On the Road to Price No. 2 - North Horn Formation
June 24, 2010
Photographer: Kurt Allen Fisher
Summary Author: Kurt Allen Fisher
On US Highway 6 in Utah, driving towards Price City at the county line between Wasatch and Carbon counties, a roadcut exposes the North Horn Formation. This formation consists of Paleocene Epoch siltstones laid down between 58 to 66 million years ago as the ancient Sevier Mountains rose in western Utah and forced an invading sea to retreat to the east. The deposition of this formation straddled the late Cretaceous and early Cenozoic periods and contains some of the last dinosaur fossils. In the 1930s, the North Horn formation yielded one of the two known North American fossil specimens of Torosaurus (Torosaurus utahensis). Torosaurus is a member of the Ceratopsidae family and appears similar to its well-known cousin - Triceratops. The North Horn Formation also yielded fossilized teeth of Tyrannosaurus Rex. In 2009, the Utah Museum of Natural History and the University of Utah Geology and Geophysics Department conducted further excavations here. The College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum, in Price, about 20 mi (32 km) further south on Highway 6, is a showcase for fossils from lower formations laid down during the Jurassic Period.