Fossil Shack

Local Business Spotlight:  Fossil Shack

By Paul Johnson

PICTURED: Owner Seth Sorensen with a dino head and artifacts from "the Shack".

"I'm just a kid who never grew up," owner Seth Sorensen told me when I asked how he ended up in the fossil business. Located at 25 South 100 West, Payson, "the Shack" occupies the northwest corner of the same block as Total Fitness and the Payson Library. It combines a retail outlet with a workshop where Seth and his assistants do the professional work of cleaning, restoring, preparing, and framing fossils, large-scale dinosaurs and ice-age mammals included. Besides fossils, the shop sells a wide assortment of geodes and polished rocks.

It has the great timing of joining Payson's economic scene right after every rockhound's erstwhile favorite outlet, White Feather Rocks, just closed their Santaquin location.

When asked for his business's main takeaway, Seth quipped that it doesn't matter "whether you're some Hollywood A-lister making millions or a 10-year-old kid saving up pocket change," everyone can have their own piece of history.

Fossil Shack is a family business owned by Seth and his wife. He hails from Sanpete County, his wife is from Spanish Fork, and they currently live in Salem. They service customers around the world, including museums in places as diverse as the Philippines and Slovakia, but they decided that they wanted to stay in Utah Valley to raise their kids.

While most of their work represents the "restore" portion of the "dig -> restore -> educate" pipeline, they also do some of the digging and education portions as well. He maintains a small handful of employees working at a private quarry they own, and a few in the shop.

How did he get started?, I asked. "Just a box of fossil rocks in my living room" as a kid. From there, it was project based, taking care of cleaning and preparation work for one buyer at a time. The welding he learned in high school has also been vital to the engineering process of wiring the bones together cleanly for exhibits.

The retail side is only a relatively small side-venture. Their main focus and primary revenue stream has traditionally been fossil preparation for big-ticket customers like museums and wealthy collectors, such as a piece he recently finished on commission for the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C.

Even though selling to local customers doesn't make much in comparison, Seth says it's a rewarding cause -- a mission helping kids get excited to own their own piece of natural history and maybe get them started dreaming about going into paleontology themselves someday.

On that note, one of Fossil Shack's primary purposes is public education. Seth recently made arrangements with the Payson Library to bring over exhibits for kids to see at booths in the library later this year and to have the librarians bring kids to his shop as part of their event programming. He is similarly working with one of the local schools to arrange a field trip. Young visitors will get to see the workshop side in action and learn how artifacts from fossil digs are professionally cleaned and prepared for display. Relatedly, one of his near-range goals is to start his own paleontology museum in South Utah County under a nonprofit that he recently formed.

 

I inquired how a hobbyist like him gets started, and even more interestingly, how a hobbyist ends up as a global-servicing professional. "It's all referral-based." Since there are so few people doing the restoration phase professionally, "someone out in a place like Montana or Morocco digs and finds their first fossil, and they ask their contacts who does prep work. Their contacts tell the guy to call someone like us."

Only a small handful of suppliers like him constitute the fossil-preparation industry worldwide, so it's heavily networking-based. The few businesses who do what he does face constant and high demand; Fossil Shack's current work backlog is 4 to 5 years. That demand comes partly from wealthy individuals like movie stars or famous athletes who acquire big pieces to display at home, like a triceratops he recently installed in a sports star's mansion entryway.

Their other main source of demand is museums. Even though many natural-history museums have a staff display where visitors get to see extraction projects taking place live behind plexiglass, museums tend to outsource most of that work to private shops like his. His recent contracted effort for the Smithsonian emerged from a referral. The Smithsonian had reached out to their contacts asking who could take care of a project they needed done, and another museum he had recently serviced dropped his name. 

It's not just the expertise that high-profile outlets come to him for, it's also his private quarry. For instance, besides his own employees, he also allows staff from Fossil Butte National Monument, the National Park Service center in Wyoming, to dig in his quarry as well and freely donates to the park service whatever they extract.

My own assessment: If I didn't already live in Payson, it would easily be worth coming all the way from Ogden or Delta to give my kids the chance to see live professional fossil-prep work up close... and maybe each come home with a tooth or a trilobite in a box. 

With a showroom of display shelves already set up, Fossil Shack is currently open by appointment as they finish renovating the rest of the building.

Visitors can reach out via their website, https://www.fossilshack.com/. Seth is currently coordinating a grand opening with the Chamber of Commerce, anticipated to take place sometime within the next month.