the first paleontologists to push for monu-
ment designation. Without protection, he
says, “our knowledge of our planet [will be]
diminished forever.”FOR A LESSON in how monument status can
pay off for paleontology, Gay motions to-
ward Grand Staircase-Escalante National
Monument, 228 kilometers away across
the mesas and canyons of southern Utah. A
similarly rich fossil trove, from the era when
dinosaurs ruled, helped make the case for
that monument, which was established by
then-President Bill Clinton in 1996 and cut
in half by Trump in another December 2017
proclamation. An influx of federal funding
followed, which Polly credits with allowing
researchers to uncover some of the world’s
best records of the Late Cretaceous.
Within 10 years, researchers had discov-
ered fossils from 25 taxa new to science and
documented the rise of flowering plants,
insects, and the ancestors of mammals be-
tween 145 million and 66 million years ago.
“It was essentially the origin of modern eco-
systems happening in the Cretaceous before
the extinction of the dinosaurs,” Polly says.
“And I think it is safe to say that we wouldn’t
have that concept if it hadn’t been for the
research at Grand Staircase.” He estimates
that 40% to 50% of SVP members have used
data from Grand Staircase-Escalante stud-
ies, and another 10% have conducted re-
search there themselves.
“Bears Ears is sort of like what Grand
Staircase was at one time—there were a few
sites known [when the monument was cre-
ated] and clearly a lot of potential,” he adds.
Bears Ears’s record begins earlier, more
than 340 million years ago, when the super-
continent Pangaea spanned much of the
planet. A tropical sea that covered the
area began to fill with sediment shed by
the uplifting Rocky Mountains, leaving
thousands of prehistoric sea creatures,
mammallike reptiles, and dinosaurs en-
tombed in hardened mudflats. Some of
those fossils help tell the story of the “great
dying” 252 million years ago, which killed
96% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial
ones, clearing the way for dinosaurs. Others
chronicle the End Triassic extinction some
50 million years later, which wiped out 76%
of terrestrial and marine life.
Amid the red-rock spires of the Val-
ley of the Gods, for example, Huttenlocker
and his team are uncovering a trove of
300-million-year-old fossils, including what
may be the most complete skeleton of a
sail-backed synapsid predator known as Di-
metrodon. Meanwhile, with the help of high
school students, Gay has discovered what
could be the largest concentration of Trias-
sic fossils in the United States—and pos-sibly the world. Excavation has just begun,
but already Gay and his team have found
rare fossil fragments of four phytosaurs—
6-meter-long crocodilelike creatures that
roamed these lands 212 million years ago.
Many other sites remain uninvestigated.
Early on, says paleontologist Allison
Stegner of the University of Wisconsin in
Madison, some locals skeptical of the monu-
ment came to share scientists’ enthusiasm
for the resources it aimed to protect. When
the Bears Ears designation was first pro-
posed, “people were excited to learn about
what was in their area. [They] were totally
unaware that southeastern Utah is a world-
class destination for paleontology,” says
Stegner, who did local outreach for the Bu-
reau of Land Management (BLM) while the
monument was under consideration. But
there was little money and staff to nurture
the emerging goodwill, and the momentum
was lost, she says. “Instead, what’s happened
is a lot of animosity toward the monument.”
Many local and state officials were op-
posed to the monument from the start,
viewing its land use restrictions as too strin-
gent and its designation as an overreach of
federal authority. Earlier this month, Trump
acknowledged that Utah lawmakers influ-
enced his decision to carve out large pieces
of the monument, saying he did it for Sena-
tor Mike Lee (R) and a “very special person,”
now-retired Senator Orrin Hatch (R).
Mining companies, eyeing the area’s rich
uranium deposits, also sought the rollback.
The low price of uranium is likely to keep
companies from starting new digs anytime
soon, says David Talbot, a uranium and bat-
tery metals analyst with Eight Capital in To-
ronto, Canada. But if the price does spike—it
has been on the rise for 2 years—that could
change. (Under a September 2018 court rul-
ing, however, BLM must notify the plaintiffs
before approving any new development on
the former monument lands.)
Now that the boundaries have been re-
drawn, the Valley of the Gods and much of
the area where Gay’s Triassic cache lies are
outside the monument, as is the Indian
Creek bone bed where Huttenlocker spot-
ted the watchful eye. “As far as we can tell,
[the administration] gave no consideration
to the vertebrate fossil sites when redraw-
ing the new boundaries,” Huttenlocker says.
The two units that remain include important
paleontological and cultural sites, such as a
bed of more than 250 dinosaur tracks and an-
cient Puebloan rock art in Shay Canyon. But
most of Bears Ears’s richest paleontological
treasures are now on the outside, Gay says.
The loss of monument status means
those treasures could be exposed to many
dangers. Off-road vehicles are now al-
lowed to crisscross the monument’s formerNEWSSCIENCE sciencemag.org 18 JANUARY 2019 • VOL 363 ISSUE 6424 219
can tribes. Their argument: The 1906 An-
tiquities Act used to create Bears Ears only
allows presidents to establish monuments—
not to drastically reduce them. The cutbacks
represent an “extreme overreach of author-
ity,” SVP said in announcing the lawsuit just
days after Trump’s move. If SVP wins, the
ruling could set a precedent that would help
safeguard the boundaries of the 158 national
monuments created under presidential au-
thority; if it loses, future presidents could
gain new powers to downsize them.
At Bears Ears, the potential loss to
science—and society—is sizable, says former
SVP President David Polly, a paleontologist
at Indiana University in Bloomington. Fos-
sils here chronicle major events that remade
the world—from the evolution of early life
on land 340 million years ago to the shift in
climate at the end of the last ice age that ush-
ered in the era of human civilization.
“It’s a landscape of stories,” says Rob Gay,
a paleontologist and education director with
the Colorado Canyons Association in Grand
Junction, who has studied the Bears Ears
area for more than a decade and was among
The Valley of the Gods
and its fossil riches are no
longer protected within
the national monument.Published by AAASon January 17, 2019^http://science.sciencemag.org/Downloaded from