On a rainy July day in 2014, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument paleontologist Alan Titus made an unexpected find on the Kaiparowits Plateau. He’d been over this area — a flat gray expanse interrupted by scraggly piñon and juniper — at least five times before. But the recent heavy rains had exposed new bone: part of a tyrannosaur skull. “I just got goose bumps,” Titus said. As he and his team started digging at the site, which they nicknamed “Rainbows and Unicorns,” they discovered the fossilized remains of an entire tyrannosaur family.
“These badlands are just loaded with bones,” Titus noted as he showed me the metatarsal of a duck-billed Gryposaurus monumentensis, one of 12 dinosaur species discovered on the 1,600-square mile Kaiparowits Plateau since the monument’s designation in 1996. One of those species was named for Titus himself in 2013: Nasutoceratops titusi. “Most people would find this boring or ugly,” he said, “but there’s no more beautiful place in the world to a paleontologist.”