If you thought working or volunteering for a field house might be boring, think again! Last week, the Friends of the Utah Field House made their annual report for 2021 and despite COVID shutting down some of the annual events, like Dippy’s birthday party, the crew enjoyed a successful and busy year. Over $90,000 dollars were utilized from the David P. Jones Foundation Grant to purchase needed tools and items for fossil digs, museum collections, and for storing and protecting artifacts. Perhaps most notable from the report was the quantity of man hours put in. They provided several volunteers, who put in long hours excavating the Manwell fossil log which is now located in the Utah Field House in Vernal. Members participated in the recovery of the ichthyosaur from Flaming Gorge, the collection of leaf and insect fossils at Douglas Pass and other Green River fossil locations, plus some fossil scouting trips to locate new fossil sites. Help was also given with the recovery of some additional dinosaur, trilobite, plant, and other fossils. They had three volunteers who gave over 800 hours of combined time to catalog the museum collections and perform curation duties in 2021.
