Excerpt:
This new summer exhibit stars a life-size, moving restoration of an Elasmosaurus, a 38-foot long marine reptile with a long neck and four paddle-like flippers. This reptile roamed the shallow seas of North America during the Late Cretaceous. Featured along with the Elasmosaurus in the exhibit will be Late Cretaceous marine fossils from the Mancos Shale, the rock unit that underlies the Grand Valley from the river up to the Bookcliffs. Among these featured fossils will be the huge elasmosaurid fossil discovered at the base of the Bookcliffs last summer, the Xiphactinus fish fossil collected from the Grand Junction area in 2012, a small plesiosaur collected in the 1980s and a duckbilled dinosaur that had floated out to sea as a carcass and became buried in the Mancos mud. Along with these backboned animals, we will also have oysters, mussels and squid-relatives that are commonly found in the Mancos Shale in our area…