Cultural Heritage and Paleontology

Center Content: 

Colorado Featured Partners

BLM Colorado's paleontology program partners with museums and educational institutions to set up fossil repositories, permit fossil studies on public lands and provide education resources.

RGRM&HC Curator and BLM RGFO Geologist in front of the Stegosaurus exhibit. The dinosaur cast is made from fossils collected in 1992 from the Garden Park Fossil Area.

  • Royal Gorge Regional Museum and History Center: The Royal Gorge Regional Museum and History Center recently started housing collections from BLM lands through a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed in 2014. Due to local, state and national support, these fossils, mostly from the Garden Park Fossil Area near Canon City, Colorado, were able to stay locally and be studied, viewed, and exhibited.  This partnership, which is important for the BLM and the local community, has helped bring the public closer to these collections and the BLM- administered lands from which they were collected. In 2014, the Colorado Northwestern Field Museum became a fossil repository for BLM collections from Little Snake Field Office and White River Field Office.  Since then, the partnership has succeeded in helping find, understand, and curate new information on dinosaurs and related paleo environments in northwest Colorado.  Highlights have included excavations under permit of a duckbilled dinosaur with rare and interesting fossil skin imprints, collecting fossil dinosaur bones along an existing road on BLM, and helping protect fossil bones in Wilderness.
  • Colorado Northwestern Community College