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This story was originally published by HuffPost and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In 2016, paleontologist Robert Gay and a group of students stumbled upon a trove of prehistoric fossils in southeastern Utah, in what is part of the more than 1 million acres President Donald Trump recently cut from the Bears Ears National Monument. The team had been en route to another excavation site when an outcropping of rocks from the Triassic period caught Gay’s eye.