One More For The Road

[{"type":"text","text":"Live footage of Cowboy State Daily's Wendy Corr parking her RV....."}]

One more for no play 4 17 24

Cowboy State Daily is Wyoming’s largest newspaper with Wyoming’s most experienced journalists. 

<title>One More For The Road: Friday, February 7, 2025 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Live footage of Cowboy State Daily's Wendy Corr parking her RV.....

One More For The Road: Friday, February 7, 2025

 Live footage of Cowboy State Daily's Wendy Corr parking her RV.....

Kolby fedore

Kolby Fedore

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's managing editor, Greg Johnson.

Greg Johnson

Crime & Courts

Public Safety

Erin Mills was driving from Casper to Riverton on Friday afternoon when she found herself just behind a devastating multivehicle crash involving a semitruck that killed two people.

She stopped, “thinking I was waiting on the pilot car since they were doing construction,” she wrote in response to a Facebook post about the crash by the 

Wyoming Department of Transportation District 5

. “People started turning around (and) I was about 7 cars behind the wreck.”

Mills said that it appeared that “a huge tanker plowed into what I thought was about 6 cars,” she wrote. “I have never seen such a terrible accident. I am praying so hard for all involved and their families.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"“I was sick to my stomach all night.”"}]

Krista Nethercott, an owner with Grand Teton Funeral Home in Jackson, responded to Mills saying she was even closer to the crash when it happened.

She wrote that she got out of her vehicle and “helped assess people with another guy who was with the construction crew.”

“I am a funeral director, so I’m used to seeing stuff like this, but it was one of the worst accidents I’ve witnessed in person,” Nethercott wrote. “There was a man who ran up who was a pediatric doctor who helped.”

She described a scene where a number of people sprang into action in the aftermath of the crash.

“It was amazing seeing so many people trying to help in a crisis, and we stayed with the survivors until the ambulances finally arrived,” Nethercott wrote. “It took a very long time because the accident was in the middle of nowhere.”

The Wyoming Highway Patrol or WYDOT hasn't yet reported any other details about the crash other than confirming the two fatalities, "numerous injuries" and that the "crash involved a semitruck and a handful of vehicles."

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Highway Closed"}]

Just before 2:50 p.m. Friday, the Wyoming Department of Transportation issued an urgent alert: U.S. Highway 20/26 was closed in both directions near Hiland after the catastrophic crash involving a semitruck and multiple passenger vehicles.

For motorists headed between Casper and Riverton on Friday afternoon, the highway suddenly became a parking lot. The highway was closed for nearly 12 hours before it was reopened after 2 a.m. Saturday.

By the time emergency crews arrived on the scene, dark thunderstorm clouds were rolling across central Wyoming, Casper resident Chris Turk told Cowboy State Daily.

Turk said he had been returning from a service call in Riverton when traffic ground to a halt near the crest of a hill only a short distance from the wreck.

"We were following the pilot car through," Turk said. "It happened right on top of that hill. I wasn't far enough over the top to actually see what was going on."

He said law enforcement arrived within minutes, followed shortly by a medical helicopter.

[{"type":"text","text":"Then the weather changed."}]

"A crazy storm just came in out of nowhere," Turk said. "The wind was rocking that camper that was in front of me. I honestly didn't think they'd be able to take off."

Instead, the helicopter lifted off after only about 10 minutes on the ground, carrying one of the injured before the storm intensified.

"I was impressed," Turk said about the response. "The pilot knew what he was doing." 

Turk said conflicting reports quickly spread among stranded motorists about how many vehicles were involved.

"The only thing that seemed to have matched up was two people died," he said. 

By Sunday, the Wyoming Highway Patrol had not released an official statement detailing how the collision happened, how many vehicles were involved, or the total number of people injured.

According to the agency’s online fatality crash summary, Friday’s crash represents the 55

 deaths on Wyoming roads so far this year. That’s up from the 51 people killed on state roadways through the same time in 2025. 

As investigators worked to determine exactly what happened, Turk said he was left with the same thought shared by many motorists stranded on the highway that afternoon.

[{"type":"text","text":"\"I hope everybody's OK,” he said."}]

Highway 2026 crash Natrona county sign J Stephen Conn via Flckr 6 27 26

<title>Witness To Double Fatal Crash Says ‘A Huge Tanker Plowed Into' Construction Scene | Cowboy State Daily</title>

“A huge tanker plowed into what I thought was about 6 cars,” is how one witness described the scene of a devastating double-fatal crash Friday on Highway 20/26 in Natrona County. “It was one of the worst accidents I’ve witnessed in person,” said another.

Witness To Double Fatal Crash Says ‘A Huge Tanker Plowed Into' Construction Scene

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily political columnist, Rod Miller.

Rod Miller

Opinion

CSD Columnists

Saturday Night Live writers could have stayed up all night long at Burning Man, eating peyote and howling at the moon, and they wouldn’t have been able to write a sketch as funny as the body cam 

 getting busted for (allegedly) driving drunk. 

Please don’t construe this column as condoning the behavior of a politician who drinks better when he drives, but material like this doesn’t present itself all that often. So, I feel it’s my duty as a responsible satirist to pounce right on it like a ravenous tomcat on a three-legged mouse.

Allemand, of Natrona County's House District 58, is running for re-election as a torch-bearer for the Chemtrail Caucus, and as a self-styled “conservative.”

His re-election platform appears to be “draining the swamp” in Cheyenne one beer at a time, protecting our Second Amendment right to bear arms while sloshed behind the wheel, and fighting the woke mob so a man can get shit-faced when he wants.

I think he’ll lose that race; if so, we should keep him around just for laughs.

Comic talent like Allemand’s is generational. As you watch the video, keep in mind that it was done in one take, with no rehearsal. Unbelievable!

First we see Rep. Allemand pulled over by a Johnson County deputy sheriff. Allemand exits his pickup with a bleary gaze and unsteady gait. He engages in folksy banter with the deputy, speaking with a liquor-thickened tongue while he sways.

The officer asks if he has had anything to drink, and the legislator answers, “two beers.” Allemand does not specify whether those coupla brewskies were li’l ol’12oz Bud Lights or man-sized PBR 40s.

Within a few minutes of the stop, the deputy suspects inebriation and spots a gun on Allemand’s pickup seat, so the legislator is detained and cuffed. Then Allemand explains to the deputy that driving on interstate highways gives him anxiety, and drinking beer helps calm him. It’s a novel excuse, but the officer doesn’t seem to buy it.

Another plank in Allemand’s platform is evidently keeping the motoring public safe from anxious drivers. And he leads by example.

Several minutes follow of Allemand, with slurred speech, pleading his case as if he was on court TV, while the cops secure the scene and help the detainee into the back of a squad car for the trip to the hoosegow.

This has been covered well already. So, I’ll just hit some high points, if you’ll pardon the expression.

On the drive to the jail, Allemand tosses out that he is a legislator. That’s an odd thing to say at that moment, unless he wants to impress upon the deputy that he swings a big stick in Cheyenne. But it’s really comedic genius...a straight line that sets up the jokes later in the act.

During booking, Allemand is asked to surrender his belt - pretty standard jail protocol. He then bragged about his “Honor Wyoming” belt buckle, because it’s one of a very few in existence. Maybe he thought is was some sort of secret talisman, a Chemtrail Caucus get-out-of-jail-free card. Anyhow, I got a chuckle out of that.

Getting a DUI will cost Allemand a few hundred bucks, but getting busted for DUI while wearing an Honor Wyoming belt buckle is priceless!

Later, while being questioned about his health history, Allemand blurted out “I wish an old girl had given me herpes a couple days ago, but she didn’t.”

That made me snort and reach for the popcorn. And the penicillin.

Allemand finished his slapstick routine during his booking photo, when he told the officer that his mugshot would show up on Cowboy State Daily, and suggested that the sheriff’s office could sell the photos for “many dollars.”

That’s pretty funny, because law enforcement shares that stuff with what the Chemtrail Caucus calls the “radical left-wing media” in Wyoming free of charge. So it made me snicker.

Stand up routines may be dead in comedy clubs all over our republic, but all it takes is one drunk legislator to prove that humor is alive and well in the Big Empty.

Rod Miller can be reached at: RodsMillerWyo@yahoo.com

Rod miller headshot scaled

<title>Rod Miller: Welcome To The Allemand Show | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Columnist Rod Miller writes, "Saturday Night Live writers could have stayed up all night at Burning Man, eating peyote and howling at the moon, and they wouldn’t have written a sketch as funny as the body cam video of Rep. Bill Allemand getting busted for (allegedly) driving drunk."

Rod Miller: Welcome To The Allemand Show

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's business and tourism reporter, Renée Jean

Renée Jean

Business & Tourism

The first time Farmstead Cider went after old apples in Jackson Hole, it was just for the flavor. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"It soon became about the bears. "}]

Every fall as apples drop and ferment in the backyards and ghost orchards of Jackson Hole, grizzlies and black bears do what comes naturally. They follow their noses straight into trouble — calorie-rich fruits that taste oh-so-good when you’re a bear desperate to fatten up for winter. 

The first harvest, though, was all about the homesick wives, Farmstead Cider’s co-owner Orion Bellorado said. They had grown up on the East Coast, where apple harvests are a big deal. 

“We started harvesting the apples in our neighborhood off of peoples’ trees that were kind of derelict,” he said. “And they were tiny, so we pressed a bunch of juice and made some cider out of it.”

The party was great and word soon got around. 

“Someone from the county found out about it and said, ‘Hey, you should really put in for this community grant to start a business,” Bellorado recalled. “‘Because we’ve really been having issues with bears.’”

That was in 2016, and the business has been going ever since, bottling 5,000 to 7,000 gallons of native-yeast cider a year and selling it across Wyoming as well as other states such as Washington and Montana. 

In the process of climbing into backyards and abandoned orchards, Bellorado stumbled onto a bigger realization. Wyoming is curiously — if quietly — rich in apples across the state.

“They are everywhere,” he said. “I mean, Lander was called Apple Town before it was called Lander. It’s full on part of this interesting tidbit of our culture and our history that’s really been left behind.”

That history is being rediscovered thanks to a project called the Wyoming Apple Project. Through it, researchers have been cataloguing a hidden network of heritage and volunteer trees that have somehow survived a century or so of drought and neglect. Researchers say these hardy survivors might point the way to a new kind of apple economy in one of the harshest fruit-growing climates in America.

You wouldn’t know it from today’s landscape of hay bales and cattle, but Wyoming was once thick with apples. Homesteaders brought apple seeds to plant in their new homes, carving out orchards that were just as essential as a root cellar to their survival.

Apples meant sauce, butter, cider, vinegar and livestock feed. They were essential calories, but also comfort — the kind that could be stored up through a long, hard winter.

By the early 1900s, experimental orchards and private growers had tested at least 218 named apple cultivars across Wyoming, including 11 that were Wyoming-bred. 

Among the most ambitious of the early apple pioneers was an experimental fruit farm in Lander, which trialed 175 different cultivars under superintendent John Steinbrecht, who also developed 10 of the 11 Wyoming-bred cultivars. 

Not far away from Steinbrecht was Lander orchardist Ed Young, who planted a prodigious 3,000-some apple trees in 1882 — an act of faith in a place better known for blizzards than fruit blossoms.

At the time, Wyoming was held up as a national example of what’s possible on the frontier. 

“A lot of those early settlers, such as Ed Young, and their success in growing apples was used in news articles back east, to bring hope to people thinking about moving West,” University of Wyoming graduate and plant physiologist Jonathan Magby told Cowboy State Daily. “It helped show them that you can successfully inhabit this remote location of the United States.”

Wyoming’s apples at that time came from everywhere — Minnesota, Wisconsin, New York, Canada and even Russia. Several nurseries were involved in seeing which varieties could stand up to Wyoming’s brutal mix of cold, drought and wind, including 

At one point, at least 70 out-of-state nurseries and 20 in-state nurseries across 11 Wyoming cities were selling apple stock to Wyoming growers.

Then, slowly, the state forgot about its apples.

Wyoming’s agricultural identity shifted solidly toward cattle and general row crops. Many orchards were abandoned. Irrigation ditches shifted. Families moved away or sold off land.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Winters kept coming. "}]

And the apple trees that had been left behind continued growing. They became part of an unintended Darwinist experiment — one where only the fittest would survive. 

What’s left of the apple trees that once dotted Wyoming are now the toughest of the tough. Trees too full of Wyoming grit to give up and die.

Among the most interesting is a gnarled apple tree in Lander. Its limbs curl up to the sun like an insect on its back, and its trunk is so hollowed out, one wouldn’t be surprised to find a hobbit — or some other creature of legend — sleeping inside.

Somehow, though, this ancient tree is still alive, still leafing out, still stubbornly insisting on producing apples, despite a century or so in a place that routinely tries to freeze them to death.

Wyoming is not a state known for hardy trees. It is, after all, among the coldest and driest of states in the Lower 48. And apple trees aren’t known for being especially long-lived, either. Most never see a 100th birthday.

That makes this particular apple tree special. It’s passed a 100-year stress test, one where Wyoming wind and drought are separating the true pioneers from the pretenders.

To Magby, the Lander tree is far more than a curiosity. It’s a symbol of what Wyoming apples once were, as well as what they could be again. 

These survivors could help develop ever more hardy Wyoming stock, making apples a potential new and viable agricultural commodity. Because of that, the tree’s tissue was pulled and grafted onto new stock, so it can keep growing for another 100 years.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Like A CSI Detective"}]

Magby has been searching out all the old heritage apple trees of Wyoming using DNA finger-printing techniques more often associated with crime shows like CSI. 

So far he’s sampled 510 trees at 91 locations in 19 cities, from Lander and Sheridan to Buffalo and Casper, to figure out which trees match known cultivars and which might be lost or forgotten varieties. So far he’s found more than 150 unique genetic fingerprints that don’t match anything in old reference collections. 

Some of those varieties show up in multiple towns, suggesting they are long-lost cultivars that no longer exist anywhere else. hey are a living link to an era when Wyoming was serious apple country.

Two varieties that keep showing up, meanwhile, are Wealthy and Haralson, both bred in Minnesota. They are roughly one-third of all the identified surviving trees in his data set.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"More Than Charming History"}]

Magby doesn’t see Wyoming apples as a charming historical footnote. He believes these survivors are pointing the way to a viable agricultural commodity for the state, one that could lead to more products that are made in Wyoming, such as Farmstead Cider in Jackson Hole. Making products in Wyoming — referred to as value-added products — is a better bang for the buck. It keeps most of the economic value chain in-state.

Apple cider production makes a lot of sense in Wyoming, alongside the growing microbrewery scene, Magby said. People also just enjoy fresh produce that’s been grown in Wyoming, whether that’s an apple or other fruits.

“We take pride in anything that’s been produced in Wyoming,” Magby said. “So I’d love to see someone take a strong stance of producing and backing development of cultivars and revamping testing of grape and pear varieties and other small fruits, just to provide that diversity, not just in fresh food products, but also diversity of economies.”

Bellorado is already living that future at Farmstead Cider, thanks to bear-safety grants that helped launch a business to haul apples out of backyards and ghost orchards. 

Now, instead of attracting trouble, those apples are a useful and delicious product in a growing business. It’s more joy to the human world, all from abandoned, pioneer apple trees.

Apples Ian Mc Gregor co owner of Farmstead Cider Courtesy Photo 6 27 26

<title>Wyoming’s Ghost Apple Orchard Trees Have Been Rediscovered And Are Producing | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Wyoming was once thick with apples. In fact, it was a top apple producer. Now those forgotten apple trees are being rediscovered by small cider houses. "They're everywhere," said one cider house owner. "Lander was called Apple Town before Lander."

Wyoming’s Ghost Apple Orchard Trees Have Been Rediscovered And Are Producing

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's Feature Reporter, Andrew Rossi.

Andrew Rossi

Around Wyoming

New research indicates that Wyoming’s prehistoric hell pigs had different diets based on their size. The bigger they were, the wider the menu.

Brynn Wooten, a Ph.D. candidate at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, published 

 in Archaeotherium, a prehistoric mammal that’s better known as “the North American Hell Pig.”

“They look similar to pigs, but they’re actually more closely related to whales and hippos,” Wooten told Cowboy State Daily. “They were one of the largest things capable of eating meat in their ecosystem.”

Wooten’s study focused on the teeth of hell pigs, including specimens in the collections of the University of Wyoming’s Geological Museum. She studied the microwear on the tooth surfaces of multiple species to get an idea of what they were biting and crunching.

[{"type":"text","text":"Even she was surprised by the results."}]

“I was shocked,” she said. “We found a really interesting phenomenon that is uncommon in modern mammals. In fact, we actually see the exact opposite. It’s surprising and really interesting.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Hell Pig Person"}]

Hell pigs are an extinct group of large mammals that were widespread in North America, Europe and Asia from 36 to 19 million years ago. The first fossils were found near Fort Laramie in 1850. A food cache fossil is on display at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis.

These had enormous heads with thick jaws and powerful teeth. If that wasn’t frightening enough, the largest entelodonts could grow to the size of a horse.

Hell pigs weren't quite that big, but it was one of the largest and most successful mammals in North America during the Eocene and Oligocene periods. Its fossils are common in 

, which stretches across the western U.S.

Wooten became enamored with “hell pigs” when she saw their massive skeletons at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science as a child.  Her latest research is the first chapter of her Ph.D. dissertation on hell pigs.

“When I go to conferences, I’ll tell people when and what I’m presenting, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, you’re the hell-pig person,’ and get really excited.”

That excitement stems from the fact that while hell pits and other like creatures are legendary in paleontology, there’s been little research done on them. Wooten’s focus on the paleoecology of hell pigs is, in many ways, the first of its kind.

“Everything else has been inferred by looking at and measuring bones,” she said. “I'm taking a more quantitative approach, and that’s excited a lot of people because we’ll get to learn a little bit more about a truly lost lineage.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"You’ll Wreck Your Teeth"}]

Modern pigs aren’t picky. They’ll eat anything, making them true omnivores.

Hell pigs aren’t really pigs, but it’s always been assumed that they were similarly omnivorous. The first step in Wooten’s research was to see whether she could support or refute that idea by becoming a prehistoric dentist.

“Dental microwear texture analysis can't tell us what an animal was eating, but it can tell us the texture of what the animal was eating,” she said. “Since the diet of entelodonts has been contested, we thought it’d be interesting to see if we could figure that out.”

Wooten scanned and studied 53 hell pig teeth from 13 co-existing species in the collections of the UW Geological Museum, the Yale Peabody Museum in New Haven, Connecticut, and the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.

The fossilized teeth Wooten used for her study came from South Dakota, Colorado, Nebraska, and Oregon, with a handful from Wyoming.

Teeth wear differently depending on diet. But studying the distinct patterns of microwear on the hell pig teeth, Wooten could determine whether each individual was primarily eating brittle items, like bones, browses, and seeds, or tough items like flesh and grass.

“That's why it's important that we compare the microwear on the fossilized teeth to modern animals,” she said. “We know what modern animals are eating. If we can see similarities in microwear texture, you can infer what the prehistoric animals were eating.”

Wooten had an idea of what she’d see on the teeth. What she exactly saw subverted her scientific expectations.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Who’s Eating What"}]

After examining the dental microwear texture on the teeth of hell pigs and comparing that with that of modern animals, clear patterns emerged. They weren’t the patterns Wooten was expecting.

“I was really expecting to scan these and come out with everything that was eating super hard things,” she said. “When the results came back, I was shocked.”

Several teeth showed the telltale textures of a bony diet, comparable to the teeth of modern hyenas. Others showed little to no evidence of anything hard in their diet, with microwear comparable to that of modern cheetahs.

Wooten decided to explore these differences until she found an explanation.

“As I was exploring these differences, I discovered a body-size difference,” she said. “I ran all the statistics with the body size separated into smaller and larger, and that's when I found that there was this significant difference in diet.”

Wooten’s conclusion was that the smaller hell pigs were eating tougher food while the bigger ones were eating whatever they could. That’s an anomaly in modern ecosystems.

“Larger animals actually eat softer foods because they have the liberty of eating softer foods,” she said. “Smaller animals eat whatever they can get because they're not as advantaged as the larger animals. That’s what we expect to see in nature. The opposite is fairly uncommon.”

Wooten also noted that this size-diet split was tied to species, not age. Smaller species of hell pig had softer diets, while larger species had harder diets.

“The larger-bodied individuals ate like hyenas, but the small-bodied individuals ate like cheetahs,” she said. “Cheetahs are exclusively flesh eaters, so it’s possible the smaller Archaeotherium were exclusive flesh eaters, too.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Gimme, Gimme!"}]

With this intriguing diet disparity determined by body size, it’s only natural to speculate what that could reveal about the biology and behavior of hell pigs.

Wooten doesn’t want to jump to conclusions, but she did say the differences in the diet could have been partially caused by a common behavior scientists see in many modern ecosystems: kleptoparasitism.

That’s a big word for big animals stealing food from small animals. Wyomingites can see it happen all the time in places like Yellowstone National Park.

“Bears will scare wolves, lynxes, or pumas from their kills and eat the remains,” Wooten said. “When you’re scavenging, you eat bone even if you don’t really mean to.”

Wooten referenced a fossil from the White River Formation that suggests the same behavior. It’s believed to be 

, containing several partial skeletons of Poebrotherium, a small prehistoric camel.

“The camels were killed by a bite to the head and neck,” she said. “The meatier portion of their bodies — the butt — was eaten, while front portions, the head and arms, were dragged back to a meat cache.”

This fossil has been cited as evidence of active hunting by hell pig mortoni, which Wooten called “the smallest of the smaller-bodied Archaeotherium species.”

The butt-less Poebrotherium food cache might give more credence to kleptoparasitism among hell pig species. If the camels were killed by a smaller-bodied species, it would align with what Wooten discovered from her dental microwear analysis.

“Maybe the smaller ones would run and actively hunt their food, and the larger ones could have scared them off and consumed their kills,” Wooten said. “It's really hard to have two different kinds of animals that are living at the same place at the same time, because then they're constantly going to be fighting for resources.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A Closer Look"}]

Wooten has learned a lot from the dental microwear analysis of hell pig teeth. The next step in her research is more in-depth dentistry.

“The next step is using stable isotope analysis to put more of the puzzle pieces together,” she said. “That’ll give me a better picture of what was going on.”

Stable isotope analysis is an increasingly powerful tool in paleontology. A 2025 study 

determined the diets of Jurassic dinosaurs

, down to the specific salads Brontosaurus ate, using the calcium isotopes preserved in their tooth enamel.

Using stable isotope analysis on hell pig teeth, coupled with the microwear textures, would help Wooten narrow down the dietary preferences of the different-sized species.

It will also shed insight on whether hell pigs were primarily carnivorous or had a more generalist diet of meat and plants.

“Unless we have a time machine, I don't think I'm ever going to know exactly what they were eating day-to-day,” she said. “Stable isotope analysis will help clarify the textures of foods being eaten and potentially lead to a path to infer what actual foods were being eaten.”

Wooten has already done some stable isotope analysis, but she’s not at liberty to share what she’s learned. That’s for the next paper.

[{"type":"text","text":"“It’s embargoed, but it’s very fascinating,” she said."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Archaic And Unknown"}]

Wooten’s ultimate goal is to use her ongoing dental analysis to build “a broader picture” of the many species of hell pig in their ancient environment.

“Going forward, I’ll focus more heavily on general paleoecology,” she said. “Where were they living? How might they have adapted to the changing environment? How do they utilize the resources in their habitats?”

Wooten believes there’s a lot to learn from hell pigs. It was a long-lived and diverse genus that served as a top predator in its ecosystem for 17 million years.

“That’s a really long time for any genus, let alone one with over a dozen different species, to survive,” she said. “They’re all related to reach others, but distinctly different, which is another really interesting factor in all this.”

That means she’s more than content to be “the hell-pig person” for the rest of her career.

“I fell in love with these creatures,” she said. “They’re so archaic and unknown. They’re different from anything else we have today, and it’s always going to be exciting to learn a little bit more about them.”

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<title>Wyoming's Prehistoric Hell Pigs Looked Like Pigs But Were More Like Whales And Hippos | Cowboy State Daily</title>

The first fossils of the prehistoric mammal known as the "North American Hell Pig" were found near Fort Laramie, Wyoming in 1850. Scientists say although they look similar to pigs, they are more closely related to whales and hippos.

Wyoming's Prehistoric Hell Pigs Looked Like Pigs But Were More Like Whales And Hippos

The Fry family lost their 14-year-old corgi Lola on May 16. She was wandering near her home along Wyoming Highway 50 south of Gillette when she disappeared without a trace.

Nearly a month later, Lola turned up in a Facebook Classified post in Wisconsin, more than 1,000 miles away.

When Gillette's Kimberly Fry got a phone call at 8:15 a.m. that someone had found their 14-year-old corgi in Wisconsin, she started crying. An hour later, her family was on the road and drove more than 1,000 miles straight to get their rescued dog.

One More For The Road: Friday, February 7, 2025

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