150-year search for the Lost Monster of Cañon Pintado

Dr. John Strong Newberry stuffed his crude rock pick back into his bag and stared at the bone fragments lying before him—the shattered remnants of a titan locked inside 150 million years of solid sandstone.
As the chief scientist of the Macomb Expedition, sent from Santa Fe that summer of 1859 to find a military supply route through Utah, he was used to unyielding terrain, but this cliff had beaten him.
He was lucky enough to find a few specimens he could wrench free from their rock coffin to take back to Santa Fe, but the bulk of the giant was destined to remain in the firm clutch of stone until some future scientist, with more time and better tools, could liberate it for study. He couldn’t have known how long that would be. 
The expedition ended just as the national dispute over slavery heated up, eventually kicking the country over the cliff into the Civil War. The nation’s bleeding shuffled Newberry’s discovery into the shadows.
Any reports of the ancient beast were relegated to some obscure, forgotten file in one of those musty, gas-lit warrens of mid-nineteenth-century Washington, D.C. For the next 115 years, the trail went entirely cold, and the giant slept undisturbed.
I wouldn’t have known the trail was ever reopened had I not reached out to Winston Hurst months ago to ask what he knew of the Old Spanish Trail. He responded by offering to loan me his copy of “Canyonlands National Park: Early History and First Descriptions” by Fran Barnes. I picked up the scent of the trail in the pages of that book. 
It started in 1974, when a letter landed on the desk of a Brigham Young University expert known as “Dinosaur Jim” Jensen.
A well-respected East Coast professor, Dr. Jack McIntosh, wrote the letter asking if anyone in Utah knew anything about the West’s first sauropod dinosaur reportedly found there long ago.
“Dinosaur Jim” was not only clueless about the location, but perhaps a touch embarrassed to admit he’d never even heard the yarn.
So, Jim handed the cold case over to his Moab friend, Fran Barnes.
For Fran, hearing about a massive, lost dinosaur quarry sitting somewhere in his own backyard was akin to hearing the bark of his favorite dog, long lost and never to be seen again.
The letter created an itch that would take Fran twelve grueling years to scratch.
With the bark of that lost dog still ringing in his ear, Fran set out to find the lost dinosaur quarry by dusting off the 1876 Macomb expedition report, released 17 years after the trek ended, and written by Newberry himself.
He learned that the quarry was within a quarter of a mile of Camp 26 atop a 250-foot layer of Entrada sandstone. He learned from the same report that Macomb followed the Old Spanish Trail into southeast Utah, but its exact route wasn’t widely known.
In essence, he was searching for the remains of a 150-million-year-old carcass of a beast on a 150-year-old, cold, mule trail, much of which crossed bare sandstone that refused to hold a track.
He knew the cliffs before him were a scroll holding the secrets of deep time. But without a way to read them, they were just giant, immovable stone lips.
Nine years of walking the dry washes had yielded nothing but dead ends, and Fran was worn down to the saddle blanket. He had ground away his boot soles on everything from the sunbaked sand and gravel of dry washes to the vertical faces of sandstone cliffs.
It was 1984, and he and his wife Terby were in Washington D.C. on a different type of search, in a different type of desert. It was one of those chases where they didn’t know exactly what they were looking for but trusted they’d recognize pay dirt when they hit it.
In a room filled with papers belonging to the in-laws (Rodgers) of expedition leader John Macomb, Terby found the long-sought clues Fran had been desperately searching for.
In a dusty old binder bearing 23 sheets of yellowing legal-sized paper were the original handwritten notes of Charles Dimmock, the expedition’s topographer.
On those pages was a detailed description of the entire route, including campsite locations, distances, and descriptions of surrounding land features. They now had the “Rosetta Stone” that would serve as a bridge across those 150 elusive years.
Dimmock’s notes failed to lead Barnes directly to the site as he had hoped but sent him on a three-year hunt akin to trying to read a horse track on wind-scoured slickrock.
There were hundreds of feet of rock to cover in search of a few scraps of prehistoric bone — a task about as forgiving as trying to find a dropped horseshoe nail in a square mile of dusty sagebrush.
Details were so subtle that when Barnes finally stood on the site in 1987, he didn’t realize it at first. John Newberry had confidently predicted in 1859 that the quarry would be ‘readily recognized’ by future travelers, but the sheer, vertical reality of the cliff proved otherwise.
Being 250 feet off the canyon floor in rugged terrain meant Barnes didn’t so much ‘find’ the site as earn it with blood, sweat, and bruised knees over twelve years.
The 19th-century dinosaur expert Edward Drinker Cope christened the beast Dystrophaeus viaemalae a century and a half ago.
As Barnes stood on the ledge, staring at the rubble of sand, rocks, and bone chips, he gave his blessing to the species name viaemalae, Latin for “bad road.”
He had the bruised elbows and skinned knees to prove it, but was left wondering how to get those bones into the hands of people capable of reading the mysteries locked within them.
(Next week: How Fran Barnes’ rediscovery leads to the fulfillment of Newberry’s 1859 prophecy.)