Artist Allan McCollum's latest exhibit, entitled "Natural Copies from the Coal Mines of Central Utah," features casts of dinosaur tracks found in the roofs of coal mines in central Utah. McCollum discovered a collection of over 40 of the fossils on display at the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum.

The tracks were discovered by local coal miners, carefully excavated from freshly discovered locations and then donated to the museum. The museum allowed McCollum to have rubber molds made from the tracks and the molds were moved to New York in 1994. New production molds were made from the originals and natural copies for the exhibit were produced in early 1995.

The tracks were created by a series of prehistoric circumstances.

First, the dinosaurs walked over spongy beds of decaying vegetation and the footprints were filled with sand. Thousands of feet of additional sediment were deposited on the tracks, which compressed the peat to form coal and solidified the sand to sandstone. Mining activities left the tracks protruding downward into the shafts and the tracks were discovered when the residual coal was removed, exposing the white sandstone filling the original tracks.

In addition to the "Natural Copies" exhibit a series of essays and articles from popular and scientific sources on the history and significance of the dinosaur track natural cast phenomena, researched and compiled by the artist, are also presented in the gallery in the form of photocopies available free to the visitors.

"The hundreds of natural copies in Allan McCollum's present exhibit might be seen as simply the most recent chapter in a narrative which stretches from prehistoric times to the present and recounts the different incarnations of an unusual kind of trace fossil," pointed out a press release issued by the museum. "The original 65-million-year-old casts, discovered since the 1920s by coal miners working in central Utah, are clearly artifacts in a story of natural history. But this narrative intersects with another one, the local history of a particular community.

The footprints, found by workers in the roofs of coal mines, valued as objects of curiosity or aesthetic beauty, were additionally understood as specimens of some scienific merit and were sold or donated to the local paleontology museum by their original owners. This suggests a complex network of related stories involving community relations and museological practices."

"By reproducing the natural casts as artwork, McCollum intersects another narrative into the story," explained the press release. "Originally discovered in the roofs of underground coal mines, the footprints' inverted position offers the eerie experience of a dinosaur walking on the ground above one's head, already suggesting the realm of the fantastic: monsters and exotic creatures from a primeval and forgotten past, treasures produced over the millennia and unearthed from the subterranean depths through the competitive and determined search for the `rock that burns'".

The dinosaur tracks will be on display until April 22.