The museum is operated by the College of Western Colorado. It is on the eastern end of the famous Dinosaur Diamond on the Morrison formation. There are a lot of dinosaur fossils in the area. The DVM wasn't as large as the Denver Museum, but it was very interesting. The resident paleontologist, Dr. Britt, took Harrison to the lab and gave him two cast teeth of a raptor. Harrison's favorite part was the robot, and Amanda's was the sauropod that she could hug.

Links: (See below for resources you can buy online)

• Dinosaur Valley Museum

We stayed at the Grand Junction KOA. It was a great place, with a warm pool that we used every day. They helped us upload some pages. THANKS!

-by Amanda
Triceratops was the largest and heaviest horned dinosaur. It lived in the late Cretaceous period. It was 30 feet long and 10 feet high and weighed 6 tons. The head was 7 feet long and the horns were 3 feet. It was an herbivore. This is a picture of a mama Triceratops who is guarding her eggs. This model would stomp her feet and roar.

-by Harrison
This is a digging simulator. The "sand" was made of crushed walnut shells. There were lots of cool bones from most major parts of an Apatosaurus. We used our hands and some brushed to uncover the bones. There was a femur at the top of the "sandbox" that was fractured into about five pieces. There was a quarry map with a drawing of the bones and a key to what they were. The quarry map helped identify the bone, and see where it fit in the dinosaur.

-by Amanda
This is a picture of a young sauropod in a death pose. A death pose is with his head arched back and his tail turned up.

-by Harrison
This is a picture of Camarasaurus, a dinosaur with his nose above his eyes. If you compare an unidentified bone with a known bone, you may be able to find out what kind it was and how old it was. For example, the skull on the left is of an adult Camarasaurus, and the one on the right is a juvenile.

-by Amanda
When fossils are found, they cover it with plaster called a field jacket and send it to the lab where they can work on it.

Amanda and Harrison played with a robot Pachycephalosaurus dinosaur. It was interesting because you could move it around as if it was your dinosaur. There were two sections, that you could turn his head or his body.

Color Me! Click on this picture for a full size one that you can print and color.

Grand Junction was a great place to visit. It is a pretty town that isn't too big, but big enough to have everything. On every street corner downtown there is some piece of art. We called this one "Pedalasaurus." Can you guess why?

It's Dinamation because things move! That's how Amanda described the Dinosaur Discovery Museum. It wasn't full of skeletons, like most other museums, but it had cool Dinamation robots, and hands-on activities, to make learning about dinosaurs and their world very exciting. There was even an earthquake simulator!

Links: (See below for resources you can buy online)

• Dinamation

-by Harrison
This is a simulator thas how fossils are carried through rivers and streams. The educational part about it is that it shows how fossils pile up. That is why fossils are often found in groups, because they get carried to the same place. The fun part about it is that is is all playing.

If you take a turtle and a snake, Mix them together and what does it make, A neck thats long, a tale that's strong, And four paddles, they all belong to, A-B-C-D-Elasmasaurus, Elasmasaurs, The giant of the sea.

Color Me! Click on this picture for a full size one that you can print and color.

These are pictures of Parasaurolophus. Amanda thinks that Parasaurolophus is her favorite dinosaur because it is a plant eater, which are called herbivores, and it is cute.

Harrison learned that the crest on the head of the Parasaurolophus may have been a sound chamber. It may have been used to alert others or to contact a mate. The sound chamber simulator made a sound like a duck quack. It could make high or low sounds.

-by Amanda
This dinosaur, Dilophosaurus, spits water. He looks scary. Some scientist think that dinosaurs may have had poisonous spit or other venom like some lizards and snakes have today.

ROAR! -By Harrison
This was a dinosaur shadow puppet theater, but it wasn't any ordinary puppet show. There is a light on the floor shining toward a screen that produces shadows on the other side. You hold a dinosaur head in front of your head so the audience doesn't know that it is your head. I was a Tyrannosaurus Rex. We did a play where a Tyrannosaurus was eating two other dinosaurs. The others were Parasaurolophus (Amanda) and Triceratops (Mom).

About 20 miles west of Grand Junction, or two miles east of the Utah-Colorado border is an outdoor musuem in a place called "Rabbit Valley." They call it "Trail Through Time." There were a few dinosaur fossils still in stone, and several petrified wood pieces and other geological formations.

This picture is of some vertebrae of a juvinile sauropod, probably a Camarasaurus. It was really hard to find them in the rock at first, but the picture shows them pretty well. Each vertebrae looks like an X. There were about five of them in the side of the rock.

This is a partial skeleton of a Juvenile Diplodocus. This one was really hard to recognize, until we stood with the light just right. Then all of a sudden, there it was.

This picture has a bunch of fossil bone fragments in it. There is one good fragment right in the middle of the picture. Can you see it? It's pretty hard, isn't it?

This hike took us about 2 1/2 hours, and we saw just about 3 or 4 dinosaur fossil sites. It wasn't too hot, but we were glad we had a lot of water with us. We felt like real paleontologists, because we had to walk so much and only found a little bit. But it was a fun hike.

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