Red Gulch Dinosaur Tracksite
— — the morning a small dinosaur crossed a tide flat.
Not only on a wall.
“Red Gulch sits on Bureau of Land Management ground in the Bighorn Basin, on a back road off US 14 between Shell and Greybull. The tracks were found in 1997, more than a thousand of them pressed into a thin limestone bed that was the floor of a shallow Sundance Sea about 167 million years ago. Most belong to a small theropod walking on the wet tide flat. The site has a short interpretive trail, a low boardwalk over the main slab, and a horizon that goes on the way the Bighorns go on. from the studio
Red Gulch Dinosaur Tracksite, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Red Gulch Dinosaur Tracksite is a Bureau of Land Management interpretive site in Big Horn County, Wyoming, about five miles south of US 14 between the small towns of Shell and Greybull on Red Gulch / Alkali Backcountry Byway. The tracks were discovered in 1997 by BLM employees and amateur geologists working in the area. They sit on a limestone bedding plane of the Middle Jurassic Sundance Formation, roughly 167 million years old, and number over a thousand individual prints, the largest known concentration from this period in the United States.
The track-bearing layer is a thin limestone in the Sundance Formation, deposited in the Sundance Sea that covered much of the Western Interior in the Middle Jurassic. Before the discovery at Red Gulch, the Sundance was considered too deep-water to preserve dinosaur tracks; the site forced a revision of the formation's paleogeography toward a shallower, tide-flat environment. Most of the prints are tridactyl theropod tracks roughly 5 to 18 centimetres long, indicating small to mid-sized bipedal carnivores walking across exposed wet mud that later hardened to stone.
Access is from US 14 about four miles east of Shell; turn south on the Red Gulch / Alkali Backcountry Byway, a graded dirt road that may be impassable when wet. The site has a small parking area, vault toilets, an interpretive kiosk, and a boardwalk over the main exposure. There is no admission fee. The BLM recommends late morning or late afternoon light for seeing the prints clearly; low-angle sun reads the depressions best. The interpretive area is generally accessible from May through October.