Paleontology
Wyoming is one of the best places to learn about not just dinosaurs but paleontology in general just because the area is so fossil-rich.
The earliest dinosaur digs in Wyoming date back to the 1870s when the first scientist came out here to find the truly massive dinosaurs, the dinosaur that everybody knows when they hear the name. Animals like; apatosaurus, stegosaurus, and triceratops. Even the first bones of tyrannosaurus were found here in Wyoming. The layers in which the dinosaurs and fossils are exposed are there right in front of you. All you have to do is gather the right tools and get the right set of eyes to spot those fossils in the ground. We’re one of the only museums in the country that has dig sites within driving distance of the museum which you can actually tour during your visit here. So this is where we got started and the fact that we haven’t left this hillside yet in twenty summers of digging is just telling of how many bones we’ve found here.
Well our museum is a little different than most museums in that most of our manpower from digging in the sight, to cleaning the bones in the lab, isn’t done by trained paleontologists like myself and my colleagues, but it’s from everyday people. Families can come out and dig in the sights with us they find bones they help us map and catalog the bones and then they come down and help clean the bones in the lab. Everywhere you look fossils are pouring out of the hillside you see tumbled bone fragments sitting at the bottom of the hill you follow them up and you see whole bones, whole skeletons just sitting there so it’s just again a perfect storm of conditions the fossils are there and we have so many people who are dedicated to studying them and finding more dinosaurs in these spots that they’re just everywhere and we’re learning more every day about what exactly Wyoming still has in store for us. I came to Wyoming because I love dinosaurs and I knew that Wyoming had some of the best dinosaur fossil fields in the world so I came out here to study it, came out here to learn, I came out here to enjoy the fossil legacy that Wyoming has to offer. That’s WY.
