By Scott Buehler, Moving UtahAl the Allosaurus, on display since 1963
Main gallery · Covered by admission · Year round · Directions
Al is an Allosaurus, and he has been on display since 1963. He first stood in the hallway outside the museum, which was then in the Price City municipal building, two years after the museum opened. He has been the thing people in this county mean when they say the dinosaur ever since. Three generations of Carbon County schoolchildren have been walked past him.
Allosaurus is Utah's state fossil and the animal that Utah's Jurassic rock produces in unusual quantity. The material for mounts like this one comes out of the Morrison Formation, and the richest single source of it in the world is a quarry over in Emery County. That site is Huntington's ground and the visitor experience there is a separate trip, but the reason Price has an Allosaurus at all runs through it.
Ask what is bone and what is cast
Almost every mounted dinosaur anywhere in the world is a mix of original material and casts, and a museum with an accredited collection will tell you which is which without hesitation. Asking that question at the desk turns a photograph into an actual visit, and in a repository holding over a million artifacts the answer is usually more interesting than you expect. It is also the single best question to give a child before they walk in.
The quarry itself is a different day and a different county
The Cleveland-Lloyd quarry that made this region famous for Allosaurus, now Jurassic National Monument, sits in Emery County and is closed for construction through 2027. It is a genuine destination in its own right and it is covered on the Huntington city guide rather than on this page. What Price holds is the museum, the repository and the mounts.
The details
Getting there
On Main Street in the middle of Price, with parking on site and on the street. The entrance is signed from the highway that runs past the building.
Before you go
- Ring 435-613-5060 to confirm current hours before you drive for a specific gallery.
- Free admission runs on Thursday evening, one of the museum's long opening days.
- Ask at the desk which parts of a mount are original bone. Staff expect the question.
- Photography rules are the museum's to set. Check at the desk rather than assuming.
- The dinosaur quarry in Emery County is a separate trip in a different county.
The Utahraptor in the front lobby
Front lobby · Visible on entry · Year round · Directions
A Utahraptor stands in the lobby, which means it is the first thing through the door and, for a lot of visitors, the reason they came. Utahraptor is the largest known dromaeosaur, it was described from Utah material, and it is a considerably more formidable animal than the raptors most people have in their heads from films.
The lobby placement is not an accident. This is a university museum in a town of eight thousand people that also functions as a state and federal repository, and putting the headline animal where anybody can see it before they buy a ticket is a deliberate piece of public access. It is the same instinct behind the free Thursday evening and the long list of people who never pay at all.
The collection holds the type specimens scientists work from
The museum's paleontology holdings include holotype material, which is the single specimen a species is formally defined against. Peloroplites cedrimontanus, an ankylosaur, is among them. That is what separates a repository from a display: the objects here are the reference standard other scientists work from, and they are held under accreditation for exactly that reason rather than for show.
There is a preparation laboratory behind the galleries
Alongside the roughly 25,000 square feet of main facility the museum runs a further 6,000 square feet of repository and paleontology preparation laboratory. Material comes in from field work across eastern Utah, gets prepared, and goes into the collection. Whether any of that is visible on a given day depends on what is happening, but it is worth knowing that the building is a working institution and not only an exhibit hall.
The details
Getting there
Straight through the main entrance on Main Street. The lobby is the first room and the mount is in it.
Before you go
- Hours follow the university calendar, with Thursday through Saturday the long days. Check the current schedule before you travel.
- The museum closes for major holidays and can shift around the academic term.
- Free entry to the whole building runs on Thursday evenings.
- This is an accredited repository as well as a display. Treat the cases accordingly.
- Confirm anything time sensitive on 435-613-5060 before traveling for it.
The mammoth cast in Past Worlds
Past Worlds exhibit · Covered by admission · Year round · Directions
The Past Worlds exhibit carries a complete cast of the Huntington mammoth and a full Columbian mammoth cast, alongside real mammoth skulls, tusks, teeth and bones. The Ice Age material is the part of this museum that most surprises people who came for dinosaurs, and the mammoth is the centerpiece of it.
The animal itself came out of the ground on 8 August 1988, during dam work at Huntington Reservoir at about 9,000 feet, and it was a bull Columbian mammoth roughly eleven thousand years old and about sixty at death, recovered better than ninety percent complete with fir needles, twigs and leaves still preserved in the gut. That discovery site is up a canyon in Emery County and belongs to the Huntington city guide. What stands in Price is the cast.
The elevation record is the detail that makes it famous
Nine thousand feet is extraordinarily high for a mammoth find, well above the previous record, and the preservation was extraordinary because the animal died in deep mud that sealed it. The gut contents are the part paleontologists care about most: an actual last meal, from an actual afternoon, eleven thousand years ago. That is why casts of this particular animal ended up in more than one Utah museum rather than only in the one nearest the hole.
Ask which mammoth you are looking at
There is more than one mammoth cast in the exhibit and there is real bone in the same room, and the labels do the work if you read them. If you are here specifically for the Huntington animal, say so at the desk. A museum that curates the region's material has staff who can tell you exactly what came from where, and getting that straight is the difference between seeing a big model and understanding a discovery.
The details
Getting there
Inside the museum, past the lobby. The Ice Age material sits alongside the dinosaur galleries rather than in a separate building.
Before you go
- Ask at the desk which specimens are original bone and which are casts.
- The Huntington discovery site is up a canyon in Emery County, not in Price.
- Free entry runs on Thursday evenings if you can time your visit for one.
- Exhibits are rotated and updated. Confirm what is currently on show before traveling for one thing.
- Phone 435-613-5060 for hours, admission and current exhibitions.
The eleven Pilling Figurines
Archaeology gallery · Covered by admission · Year round · Directions
In 1950 a rancher named Clarence Pilling found eleven small clay figurines under a rock overhang in a side canyon of Range Creek. They are unfired clay, four to six inches tall, made by Fremont people roughly a thousand years ago, decorated with applied clay ornament and still carrying traces of red, buff and black paint. They are permanently curated here, and they are the most important objects in the building.
That last claim is deliberate. Dinosaur mounts draw the crowd, but the figurines are the rarer thing: an intact set of eleven, found together, showing how people dressed and adorned themselves in a culture that left no writing. Unfired clay does not usually survive a thousand years, and eleven of them surviving in one place is why archaeologists know this collection by name.
Found together, and that is the whole point
A single figurine is an object. Eleven of them found as a group under one overhang is a deposit, and a deposit carries information that individual objects cannot: about how many, about arrangement, about intent. It is also the clearest possible argument for the rule that visitors are asked to follow at every rock art site in this county. Move something and you delete the part that mattered.
Over 700,000 archaeological objects sit behind these
The archaeological collection here runs to more than 700,000 artifacts and the museum is a state and federal repository for it, which means material recovered from public land across this part of Utah is curated in Price. What is on display is a fraction of that. The rest is in a collections facility being kept, cataloged and made available to researchers, which is the unglamorous half of what an accredited museum actually does.
The details
Getting there
Inside the museum. The archaeology side sits alongside the paleontology galleries in the same building on Main Street.
Before you go
- Confirm the figurines are currently on display before traveling for them, on 435-613-5060.
- Photography rules in the archaeology gallery are the museum's to set. Ask at the desk.
- Free entry to the museum runs on Thursday evenings.
- Free admission also applies at any time to enrolled members of any federally recognized tribe.
- Read the labels. In an archaeology gallery the context is most of the information.
Present tense, not past
The nations named here are neighbors, not exhibits
A museum that holds seven hundred thousand archaeological objects from this region has an obvious obligation, and this one states it out loud. Utah State University Eastern's land acknowledgement names the campus as sitting on the traditional and ancestral homeland of the Ute Indian Tribe and names its three bands, the Whiteriver, the Uncompahgre and the Uintah, and the wider acknowledgement names eight Utah nations.
On 30 November 2023 the museum announced free admission for all enrolled members of any federally recognized tribe, explicitly to reduce the barrier between Indigenous visitors and exhibits made from Indigenous material. That is a small policy with a large logic behind it, and it is the sort of thing worth knowing about an institution before you decide what kind of institution it is.
For a visitor the practical consequence is a matter of register rather than rules. The Fremont culture is an archaeological designation and past tense is correct for it. The nations named above are current, present day governments with current interests in this landscape, and writing or speaking about them as though they belong to the past is simply wrong. In a building that holds a thousand year old figurine and a policy signed in 2023, both timeframes are in the same room.
A thousand year old figurine and a policy signed in 2023 are in the same building for a reason.