A truck barrels down a dusty desert road in southern Utah’s vast Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, speeding through canyons and along cliffs toward a towering sandstone formation known as the Kaiparowits Plateau. Alan Titus, a Bureau of Land Management paleontologist here for nearly 20 years, is behind the wheel, his shaggy hair flapping in the July wind as Led Zeppelin blasts from the speakers.
Titus stops the truck on a shrubby hill. With his passenger, University of North Florida paleontologist Barry Albright, he sets off on a small foot path into the high desert.
The two men, longtime friends and collaborators, are heading to the scene of a catastrophe — and, possibly, the biggest find of Titus’ decades-long career.
In 2014, Titus was prospecting for dinosaurs when he kicked over a bit of bone beside a scraggly old juniper tree. It was a piece of skull from a tyrannosaur — animals that include Tyrannosaurus rex and dozens of related and ancestral species. Since that chance find, Titus and his team have recovered remains from four tyrannosaurs — an adult, a teenager and two juveniles — from a site about 1,000 square feet in size. Titus thinks these tyrannosaurs died together some 76 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period. If he’s right, it could confirm a controversial idea about one of the most iconic dinosaurs that ever lived...