218 18 JANUARY 2019 • VOL 363 ISSUE 6424 sciencemag.org SCIENCE

PHOTOS: (TOP TO BOTTOM) CAVAN SOCIAL/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; JENNIFER DICKSON/THE WILDERNESS SOCIETY

O

n a rise with a sweeping view of the

Indian Creek valley in southern

Utah, skirts of red earth unfurling

for kilometers in all directions,

Adam Huttenlocker crouches to

examine a knee-high nub of Cedar

Mesa sandstone. Embedded in the

rock is an ivory oval with a smoky

center. The paleontologist, from

the University of Southern California in Los

Angeles, leans in for a closer look. Other re-

searchers gather round, and soon they iden-

tify the mysterious eyelike fragment: It is a

cross section of limb bone, probably from a

synapsid—the group of reptiles that gave

rise to mammals—that lived here more than

300 million years ago.

Thousands of such rare fossils pepper

Bears Ears, a sweep of buttes and badlands

whose candy-striped sedimentary rocks cat-

alog hundreds of millions of years of Earth’s

history. The region’s rich paleontological

and archaeological record—and the lobby-

ing of southwestern tribes whose ancestors

lived here—persuaded former President

Barack Obama to designate the area a na-

tional monument just over 2 years ago, in

the waning days of his administration.

Now, those fossils, and the influx of spe-

cial research funding that came with the

designation, are under threat. In Decem-

ber 2017, urged on by Utah officials, Presi-

dent Donald Trump slashed the size of the

547,000-hectare monument by 85%, leaving

just 82,000 hectares split into two separate

units. Since Trump’s order took effect in Feb-

ruary 2018, the excised lands, which hold

thousands of Native American artifacts and

sites—and possibly the world’s densest cache

of fossils from the Triassic period, roughly

250 million to 200 million years ago—are

open again to mining, expanded grazing, and

cross-country trekking by off-road vehicles.

That prospect spurred the typically apo-

litical Society of Vertebrate Paleontology

(SVP), based in Bethesda, Maryland, to sue

the Trump administration in federal court,

joining archaeologists, environmentalists,

outdoor companies, and five Native Ameri-

FEATURES

Looters stole—but later returned—this

snout from a fossilized phytosaur, a crocodilelike

creature that once roamed Bears Ears.

Paleontologists struggle to protect sites that could rewrite Earth’s history

THE BONES OF

BEARS EARS

By April Reese, at Bears Ears National Monument in Utah

Published by AAAS

on January 17, 2019^

http://science.sciencemag.org/

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