Not long ago, I entered a canyon with Diane Orr, the head of preservation at the Utah Rock Art Research Association. The walls were tortuous and scarred, marked with serpentine breaks where rock gave way to underground springs that seeped from beneath the bedrock. This was a desert landscape that went against conventions, a sheen of emerald enveloped in a bottomless dark, trees looming, light all but swallowed by canopies of leaves and stalks of chalky white flowers.
At its end, the back plates of an ankylosaur — a bulky, armored dinosaur that once romped around Utah’s formerly wet, shrubby climate — were exposed, fossilized into immortality at some point during the Cretaceous.