State rules · Utah
Utah
Invertebrates and plants with a SITLA rockhounding permit and weight limits; vertebrates only under institutional permit; commercial collecting needs a lease.
Utah Code Title 79, Chapter 3, Part 5 puts vertebrate fossils on state lands under the Utah Geological Survey: dinosaur and other vertebrate fossils may not be collected on state or federal land except under a permit issued to an accredited institution, and unpermitted collection is an offence. That covers the Morrison, Cedar Mountain and Kaiparowits material that makes Utah famous.
Invertebrate and plant fossils on School and Institutional Trust Lands (SITLA) may be collected with an annual rockhounding permit, in the same quantities as the BLM petrified-wood rule — up to 25 pounds plus one piece per day and 250 pounds per year — for personal use. The permit does not cover leased mineral tracts without the lessee's consent, and does not cover state parks, wildlife management areas or sovereign lands (river and lake beds), which have their own rules. Commercial collectors need a mineral lease or materials permit from SITLA.
The Wheeler Shale and Marjum trilobite localities of the House Range are a mix of BLM land (casual collecting applies) and private claims: U-Dig and other pay quarries at Antelope Springs are private and sell what you find. Trilobites collected on BLM land are personal-use only.
Utah's five national parks, its national monuments (Grand Staircase-Escalante, Bears Ears, Dinosaur) and Utah State Parks are closed to collecting.
Sources
Cite this article
Stratum Study. "Utah" (Law & ethics). Stratum Study pack 2026.09, as of 2026-09-16. https://stratum.black/study/law/us-utah. Accessed 2026-09-20.
@misc{stratum-us-utah,
title = {Utah},
author = {{Stratum Study}},
howpublished = {\url{https://stratum.black/study/law/us-utah}},
year = {2026},
note = {Law & ethics article, Stratum Study pack 2026.09, as of 2026-09-16; sources: stratum. Accessed 2026-09-20.}
} Citations carry the pack version and the article's as-of date so they resolve to the same text later. The facts themselves belong to the sources listed below; cite those for the science.