Child & Inner Child's Guide to Dinosaurs Take the kids to the Wyoming Dinosaur Center and rediscover your inner paleontologist By Dina Mishev
Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis. WTT
The sun can be brutal in central Wyoming in the middle of summer, but no one here seems to care. We don’t seem to care about being covered in dust, crawling around on our hands and knees, or sweat dripping into our eyes either. What we do care about – and everyone from 12-year-old Jack to 62-year old Candace agrees on this – is the prospect of finding a bit of sauropod, a long-necked, long-tailed plant-eating dinosaur that includes the likes of brontosaurus. For a day at least we’ve traded our real lives to play paleontologist with the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis.
It has been a long time – decades really – since Mrs. Friel gave me detention for doodling dinos in the margins of my reading book or since my last dinosaur-themed birthday party, but still I jump at the chance to head to Thermopolis (or “Thermop” as locals abbreviate it) and dig with the state’s premier dinosaur facility. Visions of a Jurassic Park, minus the death aspect, meets Smithsonian vacation in my head.
Like most visitors to the center, I begin at the center itself. Green-painted tracks belonging to the three-toed king-of-the-carnivores, allosaurus, start on the east side of town and lead right to the center: 12,000 square feet of exhibits including 20 full-sized dino skeletons. There are a few I distinctly remember from a back-in-the-day birthday party – tyrannosaurus rex, triceratops – but the coolest is a camarasaurus, a smallish (between 24 and 65 feet long and weighing only about 20 tons) sauropod who lived in the late Jurassic.
Mr. Camarasaurus can’t beat the allosaurus, or even the T. rex, in fierceness, but where he does have them beat is that he’s a local boy – found no more than 10 miles away on Warm Springs Ranch in fact. It is the first find from the ranch to make it into the center. And, again giving him an edge over most of the other mounts is his authenticity. Many displayed dino “skeletons” are actually casts of the real thing. But not Mr. Camarasaurus. He’s even 95-percent complete, an astoundingly high figure given that there was a gap of 145 to 155 million years between his death and when he was found. That’s a lot of time for
Triceratops at the Dinosaur Center WTT
various bones to go missing.
After perusing the existing mounts, it’s time to head for the preparation lab. You can’t actually go inside, but you can watch as some of the best prep technicians in the world clean and stabilize fossils and dinosaur bones or even as they create casts of bones that will eventually go on display (the casts most likely, not the bones).
And now for the real fun. A 15-minute van ride later and we’re at Warm Springs Ranch, a 15,000-acre operating cattle ranch that happens to have a massive layer of rock called the Morrison Formation running right through it. Found in several Rocky Mountain states, the Morrison Formation is the source of many of the country’s most significant dinosaur finds. In 1993, professionals hired by German fossil-fiend Burkhard Pohl found the formation cutting through the rolling hills above Thermopolis. Pohl leased the fossil rights to the land that same year.
While some 60 sites containing dinosaur bone material have been identified on the 7,500 acres of the ranch the Morrison Formation covers, the center currently only works about 10. But that is still more than enough to keep us volunteers busy – and for Americasbestonline.net to rank the center No. 1 in its list of Top 10 Dinosaur Hunting Places in America.
Given our instructions (be very careful and keep your site clean) and our tools (knife, pick/hammer combo, chisel, small brush, bucket and scoop), we set to work, alternately crouching, laying, splaying and sitting in the dirt. Each scrape of the chisel sets my heart racing. Working in an area rife with “sauropod materials” including individual bones, bone fragments, and teeth, I can’t help but harbor the secret hope I’ll be the part-time paleo to find “the Big One.”
Three hours later, the world’s most complete sauropod skeleton to date still eludes me, but I do manage to find a bone of significant enough size (imagine a coloring marker) to warrant a flag and an entry on the site map. Maybe it’s time for another dinosaur-themed party.
In addition to Dig-for-a-Day programs, the Wyoming Dinosaur Center also offers a Kids’ Dig and Dig Site Tours. The center is open year round, and the Dig Programs run from June 1 through mid-September.
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