7/18 The Prehistory Museum, Price, UT

Price is the home of Utah State University Eastern, but as you can tell from this museum, it was once the College of Eastern Utah.  It is a small college, but fully accredited, and they have a really nice museum. 

The museum is divided into two parts--on one side is paleontology and on the other is archeology.  Both sides have a lot of locally found artifacts.   This guy meets you at the entry to the paleontology side.

There is a large paleontology lab where students can work on the various dinosaur bones they have found.  

You can see a student working on the lower-left side of this photo.  I did not want to intrude and take a direct photo of him, but he was busy grinding plaster and excess stone from some bones. 

The next few photos show some of the exhibits.  

This photo was taken from the second floor balcony.  There is also a young man working on a twisted skeleton in the box on the upper right of this photo.  He also was removing plaster and excess stone from around the body. 

 

Some casts of dinosaur tracks.

The upper floor also had an exhibit of armored dinosaurs.  This one has a shell on its rear, but just spikes on the main part of the body.  The larger one in the back had spikes all over its body.   

This sign describes the larger dinosaur in the back of the above photo. 

This one had a turtle-like shell, but a lot of spines on its head and tail, as well. 

 Here is an armored fish!  It's described in the next picture.

This depicts a saber-toothed cat attacking an ice-age Glyptodont, described in the following photo. 

 

No wonder it reminds me of a giant armadillo.  Glad modern ones are smaller. 

Giant turtle.

Having left the dinosaurs and the ice age, I walked across to the archeology section.  

It's a little hard to read, but these arrows all have signs showing what tribes made them. 

Most of these artifacts come from the Fremont people, who lived in this area. 

I have never seen an ancient shovel before.  This one had a handle, which is now missing. 

And baskets do not always survive, so these are rare. 

I thought this was interesting.  It shows a net used to capture rabbits.  They made nets that were a couple of hundred feet long and set them up, and then beaters would chase all the rabbits into the nets.  They would dry the meat and tan the skins to use for clothing and blankets.  

This is a model of Kennewick man.  He certainly does not look like most Native Americans. 

 Nicely done Fremont pithouse exhibit.