Over a decade ago, I worked on a project for the Washakie Museum and Cultural Center in Worland, filming paleontologists working in the Big Horn Basin. They showed us fossils and tiny, tiny bones, and I was allowed to touch a145-million-year-old bone of a sauropod.
Just a week or so after we did our filming, my friend who had been with us at one site in southern Montana took one of the paleontologists to a site where he had located an unusual outcrop. Turns out, his object was the skeleton of a dinosaur!
It was pretty exciting to realize that even people who didn’t really know what they are looking for could find a dinosaur as Larry did.
More recently, other significant finds have been located in Wyoming, including the oldest dinosaur bones in North America – those of a chicken-sized dinosaur that lived some 230 million years ago. The paper published by paleontologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, outlines the importance of this discovery.
This is just one of many important discoveries in Wyoming and dating back to the period in the 19th century known as the “Dinosaur Wars” when O. C. Marsh and Edward D. Cope first started crisscrossing the territory seeking specimens.
These two scientists employed significant one-up-man-ship to find the most significant specimens. Little did they realize that a century-and-a-half later scientists—and a few amateurs—would continue to discover new species of prehistoric animals.
Among the places in Wyoming where you can learn about dinosaurs is the Washakie Cultural Center, the Paleon Museum in Glenrock, and the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis. You can walk in dinosaur tracks at Red Gulch Trackway not far from Shell.
Across the West even more places are worth a visit. One in Nebraska is Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park near Royal, Nebraska.
The prehistoric animals found embedded there died from the ash fall of a volcano that erupted in present Idaho some 12 million years ago, hence the name Ashfall Fossil Beds. There are skeletons of large animals like rhinos, camels, horses, and smaller animals like dogs. And there are fossils of birds, turtles, and even plant remains including grasses and seeds.
Another Nebraska stop is at Agate Fossil Beds, south of Harrison which has both real or replica creatures found in the area such as the “terrible pig” Dionysus, the long necked, claw-toed Moropus, snarling beardogs, and dwarf rhinos.
Montana’s Dinosaur Trail
Big Sky Country knows and celebrates its dinosaurs and you can pick up a Dinosaur Passport at any of the sites along its Dinosaur Trail to get stamped as you travel from place to place.
The Carter County Museum in Ekalaka has one of the few nearly complete skeletons of Anatotitan copei, plus the complete skull of Triceratops horridus (three horns).
The Lakotas called the area around Glendive Makoshika “bad earth” or “bad land” and perhaps they saw the remains of such dinosaurs at Tyrannosaurus rex and triceratops, which you can also see at Makoshika Dinosaur Museum in Glendive, with its displays of life-sized Allosaurus and Stegosaurus, Pterosaurs of all sizes, dinosaur skeletons, a T-rex skull and many "fleshed-out" dinosaur sculptures.
There are fifteen major sites on the Montana Dinosaur Trail, which include the Fort Peck Interpretive Center and Museum with one of the most complete T-Rex skeletons in the country.
The Great Plains Dinosaur Museum and Field Station in Malta has examples of rare fossil fish, invertebrates, plants and a variety of dinosaur species including Stegosaurus and Triceratops. The Guinness Book of World Records recognizes Hadrosaur "Leonardo," as the "best preserved" dinosaur.
At the Two Medicine Dinosaur Center near Bynam adults and children can take place in field dig and has displays of dinosaur species found in the area including a baby duckbill, found in 1978 by Marian Trexler.
You may ask: Which came first, the dinosaur or the dinosaur egg? I can’t answer that question but less than three-quarters of a mile from where Marian Trexler found the baby duckbill dinosaur, is one of Montana’s greatest dinosaur discoveries: Egg Mountain, which has the highest concentration of dinosaur eggs found in the world.
At the Old Trail Museum in Choteau, you can see eggs from Egg Mountain including troodon eggs with their smooth shells, plus bumpy shelled eggs from an unknown species of dinosaurs.
Many species of dinosaur, and their actual bones, are on display at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman. The Siebel Dinosaur Complex at the Museum of the Rockies takes you right into the Jurassic era.
Utah also has a rich history of dinosaur discovery including 125-million-year-old raptors and seven-foot-tall turkeys. Among the places to see dinosaurs in Utah are the College of Eastern Utah’s Prehistoric Museum in Price, the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm, The North American Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point in Lehi, the Prehistoric Museum in Price, and The Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum in Vernal.
Whether it is bones, eggs, or tracks, you’ll find plenty of evidence of dinosaurs across Wyoming and the West.
Candy Moulton can be reached at Candy.L.Moulton@gmail.com
