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 Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis, 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 various bones to go missing.