Deep Time on the Grand Staircase explores the extraordinary world of southern Utah during the last part of the Age of Dinosaurs. From about 100 million years ago to 76 million years ago, the region was home to a diversity of plants and animals that seems impossible today: magnolias and smothering vines, conifers and sycamores played host to a menagerie of dinosaurs and crocodiles, turtles and lizards—and early members of the birds and mammals. While most of these creatures and plants would become extinct at the end of the Cretaceous, at this point in time life was flourishing, and southern Utah appears to have been a cradle of diversity and evolution. Although we see the beginnings of our modern world in this time period, we also may be able to look into the future by examining the past. The extraordinary “greenhouse world” of the Late Cretaceous may have important information for our modern world in the context of a changing climate and changing ecosystems.

Christa Sadler is a paleontologist and educator, author, and wilderness and river guide with an enormous love for all things earth. She calls Flagstaff, Arizona her home base, but pretty much any river, trail, mountain or ocean is home. Her publications include There’s This River… Grand Canyon Boatman Stories (This Earth Press); Life in Stone (Grand Canyon Association); Dawn of the Dinosaurs (Petrified Forest Museum Association); and Deep Time on the Grand Staircase: Dinosaurs, Discovery, and the Late Cretaceous World of Southern Utah (Glen Canyon Natural History Association).  Check Christa’s website for more information: this-earth.com.