Paleontology of Bears Ears National Monument (Utah, USA): history of exploration, study, and designation 1,2 3 4 5 Jessica Uglesich , Robert J. Gay *, M. Allison Stegner , Adam K. Huttenlocker , Randall B. Irmis6 1 Friends of Cedar Mesa, Bluff, Utah 84512 U.S.A. 2 University of Texas at San Antonio, Department of Geosciences, San Antonio, Texas 78249 U.S.A. 3 Colorado Canyons Association, Grand Junction, Colorado 81501 U.S.A. 4 Department of Integrative Biology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, 53706 U.S.A. 5 University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90007 U.S.A. 6 Natural History Museum of Utah and Department of Geology & Geophysics, University of Utah, 301 Wakara Way, Salt Lake City, Utah 84108-1214 U.S.A. *Corresponding author:
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[email protected] Submitted September 2018 PeerJ Preprints | https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3442v2 | CC BY 4.0 Open Access | rec: 23 Sep 2018, publ: 23 Sep 2018 ABSTRACT Bears Ears National Monument (BENM) is a new, landscape-scale national monument jointly administered by the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service in southeastern Utah as part of the National Conservation Lands system. As initially designated in 2016, BENM encompassed 1.3 million acres of land with exceptionally fossiliferous rock units. Subsequently, in December 2017, presidential action reduced BENM to two smaller management units (Indian Creek and Shash Jáá). Although the paleontological resources of BENM are extensive and abundant, they have historically been under-studied. Here, we summarize prior paleontological work within the original BENM boundaries in order to provide a complete picture of the paleontological resources, and synthesize the data which were used to support paleontological resource protection.