An important dinosaur site in Utah is unlikely to become a state park after a measure in the state Legislature was denied.
The Salt Lake City Tribune reports a bill to create Utahraptor State Park has failed in the Senate Natural Resources Committee over funding issues.
The measure would have established the state park near Arches National Park to develop and preserve a dinosaur quarry and surrounding area.
Currently, the Dalton Wells Quarry site is threatened by unregulated camping, vandalism and looting about 15 miles north of Moab. The quarry, which yielded the first fossils of Utahraptor, sits on a horseshoe-shaped 6-and-a-half-mile parcel of land that has massive deposits of dinosaur bones from at least 10 species found nowhere else in North America.
But the estimated $10 million cost of establishing the state park has held up the approval process.
