Scientists sue to protect Utah monument—and fossils that could rewrite Earth’s history

BEARS EARS NATIONAL MONUMENT IN UTAH—On a rise with a sweeping view of the Indian Creek valley in southern Utah, skirts of red earth unfurling for kilometers in all directions, Adam Huttenlocker crouches to examine a knee-high nub of Cedar Mesa sandstone. Embedded in the rock is an ivory oval with a smoky center. The paleontologist, from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, leans in for a closer look. Other researchers gather round, and soon they identify the mysterious eyelike fragment: It is a cross section of limb bone, probably from a synapsid—the group of reptiles that gave rise to mammals—that lived here more than 300 million years ago.

Thousands of such rare fossils pepper Bears Ears, a sweep of buttes and badlands whose candy-striped sedimentary rocks catalog hundreds of millions of years of Earth's history. The region's rich paleontological and archaeological record—and the lobbying of southwestern tribes whose ancestors lived here—persuaded former President Barack Obama to designate the area a national monument just over 2 years ago, in the waning days of his administration.

Now, those fossils, and the influx of special research funding that came with the designation, are under threat. In December 2017, urged on by Utah officials, President Donald Trump slashed the size of the 547,000-hectare monument by 85%, leaving just 82,000 hectares split into two separate units. Since Trump's order took effect in February 2018, the excised lands, which hold thousands of Native American artifacts and sites—and possibly the world's densest cache of fossils from the Triassic period, roughly 250 million to 200 million years ago—are open again to mining, expanded grazing, and cross-country trekking by off-road vehicles.

That prospect spurred the typically apolitical Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP), based in Bethesda, Maryland, to sue the Trump administration in federal court, joining archaeologists, environmentalists, outdoor companies, and five Native American tribes. Their argument: The 1906 Antiquities Act used to create Bears Ears only allows presidents to establish monuments—not to drastically reduce them. The cutbacks represent an "extreme overreach of authority," SVP said in announcing the lawsuit just days after Trump's move. If SVP wins, the ruling could set a precedent that would help safeguard the boundaries of the 158 national monuments created under presidential authority; if it loses, future presidents could gain new powers to downsize them.

At Bears Ears, the potential loss to science—and society—is sizable, says former SVP President David Polly, a paleontologist at Indiana University in Bloomington. Fossils here chronicle major events that remade the world—from the evolution of early life on land 340 million years ago to the shift in climate at the end of the last ice age that ushered in the era of human civilization.

"It's a landscape of stories," says Rob Gay, a paleontologist and education director with the Colorado Canyons Association in Grand Junction, who has studied the Bears Ears area for more than a decade and was among the first paleontologists to push for monument designation. Without protection, he says, "our knowledge of our planet [will be] diminished forever."

For a lesson in how monument status can pay off for paleontology, Gay motions toward Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, 228 kilometers away across the mesas and canyons of southern Utah. A similarly rich fossil trove, from the era when dinosaurs ruled, helped make the case for that monument, which was established by then-President Bill Clinton in 1996 and cut in half by Trump in another December 2017 proclamation. An influx of federal funding followed, which Polly credits with allowing researchers to uncover some of the world's best records of the Late Cretaceous.

Within 10 years, researchers had discovered fossils from 25 taxa new to science and documented the rise of flowering plants, insects, and the ancestors of mammals between 145 million and 66 million years ago. "It was essentially the origin of modern ecosystems happening in the Cretaceous before the extinction of the dinosaurs," Polly says. "And I think it is safe to say that we wouldn't have that concept if it hadn't been for the research at Grand Staircase." He estimates that 40% to 50% of SVP members have used data from Grand Staircase-Escalante studies, and another 10% have conducted research there themselves.

"Bears Ears is sort of like what Grand Staircase was at one time—there were a few sites known [when the monument was created] and clearly a lot of potential," he adds.

Bears Ears's record begins earlier, more than 340 million years ago, when the supercontinent Pangaea spanned much of the planet. A tropical sea that covered the area began to fill with sediment shed by the uplifting Rocky Mountains, leaving thousands of prehistoric sea creatures, mammallike reptiles, and dinosaurs entombed in hardened mudflats. Some of those fossils help tell the story of the "great dying" 252 million years ago, which killed 96% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial ones, clearing the way for dinosaurs. Others chronicle the End Triassic extinction some 50 million years later, which wiped out 76% of terrestrial and marine life.

Amid the red-rock spires of the Valley of the Gods, for example, Huttenlocker and his team are uncovering a trove of 300-million-year-old fossils, including what may be the most complete skeleton of a sail-backed synapsid predator known as Dimetrodon. Meanwhile, with the help of high school students, Gay has discovered what could be the largest concentration of Triassic fossils in the United States—and possibly the world. Excavation has just begun, but already Gay and his team have found rare fossil fragments of four phytosaurs—6-meter-long crocodilelike creatures that roamed these lands 212 million years ago. Many other sites remain uninvestigated.

Early on, says paleontologist Allison Stegner of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, some locals skeptical of the monument came to share scientists' enthusiasm for the resources it aimed to protect. When the Bears Ears designation was first proposed, "people were excited to learn about what was in their area. [They] were totally unaware that southeastern Utah is a world-class destination for paleontology," says Stegner, who did local outreach for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) while the monument was under consideration. But there was little money and staff to nurture the emerging goodwill, and the momentum was lost, she says. "Instead, what's happened is a lot of animosity toward the monument."

Monumental reversal In December 2017, President Donald Trump issued proclamations shrinking Bears Ears National Monument by 85% and nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by nearly half, leaving out fossil-rich areas such as the Valley of the Gods and the northern portion of Indian Creek. version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"? 0 20 Km UTAH ARIZONA Valley of the Gods Indian Creek Red Canyon White Mesa Mill Bears Ears buttes Cedar Mesa Bluff Blanding Monticello Obama monument boundaries Trump monument boundaries Mexican Hat Bears Ears National Monument Moab 0 100 Km Salt Lake City UTAH Bears Ears National Monument Grand Staircase- Escalante National Monument

Many local and state officials were opposed to the monument from the start, viewing its land use restrictions as too stringent and its designation as an overreach of federal authority. Earlier this month, Trump acknowledged that Utah lawmakers influenced his decision to carve out large pieces of the monument, saying he did it for Senator Mike Lee (R) and a "very special person," now-retired Senator Orrin Hatch (R).

Mining companies, eyeing the area's rich uranium deposits, also sought the rollback. The low price of uranium is likely to keep companies from starting new digs anytime soon, says David Talbot, a uranium and battery metals analyst with Eight Capital in Toronto, Canada. But if the price does spike—it has been on the rise for 2 years—that could change. (Under a September 2018 court ruling, however, BLM must notify the plaintiffs before approving any new development on the former monument lands.)

Now that the boundaries have been redrawn, the Valley of the Gods and much of the area where Gay's Triassic cache lies are outside the monument, as is the Indian Creek bone bed where Huttenlocker spotted the watchful eye. "As far as we can tell, [the administration] gave no consideration to the vertebrate fossil sites when redrawing the new boundaries," Huttenlocker says. The two units that remain include important paleontological and cultural sites, such as a bed of more than 250 dinosaur tracks and ancient Puebloan rock art in Shay Canyon. But most of Bears Ears's richest paleontological treasures are now on the outside, Gay says.

The loss of monument status means those treasures could be exposed to many dangers. Off-road vehicles are now allowed to crisscross the monument's former grounds, which are once again open to mining (although new projects must go through BLM's usual review process). The land will also lose out on resources aimed at beefing up research, such as personnel—Grand Staircase got its own paleontologist, for example—and special funding to develop scientific and cultural resources.

That money—part of federal funding for BLM lands protected for their scientific resources—not only funds ongoing projects and spurs new discoveries; it also helps ensure that scientists find those resources before looters do. Looting has long been a problem in San Juan County, where the monument is located. When Gay and his students found the phytosaur cache in 2016, for example, a snout from one of the creatures was missing. It was eventually returned, but looters rarely repent, Gay says. Without the protection and increased attention from BLM officials, he fears the excised areas are more vulnerable to pillaging.

Scientists will also have to compete with law-abiding private fossil collectors. The 2009 Paleontological Resources Preservation Act makes removing vertebrate fossils from federal lands a crime for nonscientists. But the rules are different for plant and invertebrate fossils, which are crucial to understanding ancient ecosystems and evolution. Within a monument, those fossils, too, can be collected only by researchers, but outside monument boundaries, anyone can gather and sell them. "Without special protection, [the sites] are more vulnerable to vandalism, which they have suffered in the past, and [fossils] can be more easily sold away to private buyers or repurposed for other uses," Gay says.

BLM has long insisted that it does what's needed to protect scientific and cultural resources on public land. Its management plan for the newly shrunken monument is still under development, but in an August 2017 statement, BLM's Utah director, Ed Roberson, called Bears Ears a remarkable landscape and said the agency's preferred blueprint provides "maximum management flexibility while protecting Monument objects and resource values." But unlike the other three draft plans, one of which would "prioritize the protection of Monument objects and values over other resources," BLM's preferred plan emphasizes "multiple uses." (Because of the ongoing federal government shutdown, a BLM spokesperson could not respond to specific questions from Science.)

Research on the excised lands is now in limbo, and Gay, Huttenlocker, and other paleontologists are racing to do as much as they can before their monument-tied funding dries up. Only one round of Bears Ears funding was doled out before Trump's proclamation. BLM has agreed to let researchers finish their work under those grants, but when that money runs out, projects outside the new monument boundaries may be left without crucial federal support, Polly says. And although paleontologists can still get permits to investigate and dig for fossils on the former Bears Ears lands, the process won't be as easy as before, when science was a priority, Polly says. Now, paleontology is just one of many uses, competing with mining, off-roading, and grazing.

In comments submitted to BLM, SVP urged the agency to treat now-unprotected areas as though they still had monument protection, giving priority to science and conservation. SVP also recommended that the agency hire four paleontologists for the greater Bears Ears area and continue to support research there.

As BLM proceeds with its plans for the shrunken monument, SVP and the other plaintiffs are hoping for a swift victory. They've already notched one win—having the case heard in Washington, D.C., instead of Utah, which the administration considered more welcoming. They now await District Judge Tanya Chutkan's decision on a Department of Justice request to dismiss the lawsuit.

As the case wends its way through the courts, paleontologists are scrambling to unlock Bears Ears's secrets. In Los Angeles, Huttenlocker and his colleagues labor to piece together the story of their newly found Dimetrodon. In western Colorado, Gay is eager to return to his phytosaur site before looters do. Meanwhile, scientists hope the sacred twin buttes that gave Bears Ears its name will continue to guard its treasures.

*Correction, 21 January, 11:20 a.m.: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified an image from Utah's Monument Valley as the Valley of the Gods. It has been replaced.