- Our museum is just 10 minutes away from the dig site, which is what's made us one of the best dinosaur museums in the world.

We don't have to transport people hundreds and thousands of miles to where the bones are.

- This whole thing got started in 1993.

The goal was, a team of people are going to search the hills of Thermopolis for one dinosaur.

So, they get in there, dig it up quickly and then move on.

But, as soon as they started getting up here and looking at all the hillsides they learned there was a lot more than just one dinosaur buried here.

So, they decided, instead of transporting these bones hundreds, if not thousands, of miles across the globe to other museums, why not build a museum right here so our bones just have to survive a 10 minute drive down the road?

So, the museum itself was opened in 1995 as a permanent home for the fossils that were found outside the hills of Thermopolis and then it just became one of the best dinosaur museums in the world in the years after that.

(upbeat music) - Paleontology is part of Wyoming's legacy.

Paleontologists came to our state back in the 1870s to excavate dinosaurs because they're not found usually on the east coast, so they had to come here.

Most museums that visit our state take the fossils and the dinosaurs out.

Our museum is special because we still have our dinosaurs here on display for the public that we're finding here.

- So, what did these sauropods eat?

- [Child] Plants.

- Plants, right.

- [Narrator] The Wyoming Dinosaur Center hosts several educational programs for the public, including dig for a day, where people can go out to the dig sites with the paleontologists on staff and look for dinosaur bones.

- From the very beginning our goal was to bring everyday people out to our property, 7500 acres of prime real estate for dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures, and we wanted people to get the first hand experience of what it's actually like to be a paleontologist.

So, every day during the summer we take people out to the sites to dig dinosaurs along with us.

You're working right alongside our staff and lots of paleontologists and nothing's planted.

You're working in a real active dinosaur site and we don't know where the bones are and where they're going to turn up.

All we know is that we're digging in the right place at the right time and most of the bones that are found here are not found by our staff.

They're found by everyday people who are doing this for the very first time.

So, we're training people how to do our job every day.

- Everything we do is to try and increase scientific knowledge for people.

We want families to come out here and see what real paleontology is like.

Whenever we come out here it's always one family per guide, or per pair of guides.

We want each family to have an individualized experience.

- So, when someone finds a bone, we keep it here at the museum, but they get logged in our records as the official bone finder.

Their name's attached with that bone for the rest of history.

We bring it down to the museum.

We'll work on it in our prep lab, get it cleaned up and that's when the real research begins, to figure out, not just the bone that you found, but what's the story behind that bone.

And most of our best discoveries have been made in the lab, which is another portion of the process that we invite people to participate in through our dig for a day and paleo prep programs.

(upbeat music) - We fund our operations through the dig for a day, through people coming to the museum to see the dinosaur bones, doing dig site tours.

That's what keeps gas in our cars.

That's what keeps us coming up here every single day to work at the dig sites.

- [Narrator] Wyoming Dinosaur Center's most massive occupant is Jimbo, a Supersaurus, discovered near Douglas, Wyoming.

While working at the Jimbo site, paleontologists exposed a much smaller, but no less significant discovery.

- So, the way I was told, Bill was supervising digs in the site one day and he saw a little cluster of bones sitting at the surface and he literally threw himself on top of it to make sure no one stepped on it and then, with the most precise tools that he had at that moment he starts chipping away at the rock to see this little specimen.

- In 2001, we had student groups working at the site in Douglas, Wyoming, and the Lori specimen was found about 10 centimeters above the Jimbo display.

So, the large sauropod that's on display in the museum, the bones were coming out of that.

This little theropod was found right above that site.

- And, it is the smallest dinosaur found in the state of Wyoming.

It's a new species, new genus and species.

That itself, is kind of important for our state, because it's a new species of dinosaur.

People are gonna be talking about it.

- You rarely get small things within an environment.

You'll get something big like a dinosaur.

You might get crocodiles, you might get turtles, but to find a small theropod dinosaur like this along with it, that's telling you the other parts of the environment.

- [Narrator] A paper published in July 2019 first introduced Lori to the world.

Lori, along with another of the museum's most important specimens, one of the world's best preserved archaeopteryx, are important links to begin explaining the relationship between dinosaurs and birds.

- We consider birds as living dinosaurs.

We don't fully understand a lot of how that happened, like when did flight appear?

When did arms stop becoming used for grabbing and be used for powered flight.

Those are questions we haven't answered.

Lori is going to fill in a lot of those gaps.

Based on the information we've collected in our paper, Lori's the earliest member of the raptor family.

So, we all know velociraptor.

This is velociraptor's grandmother, in a sense.

Now we have a much earlier raptor from North America from the late Jurassic period.

That's pushing the origins of dromaeosaurs, velociraptor family, back several million years onto an entirely different continent.

- It's exciting because you're getting a fuller picture of that environment.

Here's a small predator.

This wasn't taking down sauropods.

This was going after bugs.

This was going after maybe small mammals or frogs or lizards along that lake shore.

We hope to make the Lori specimen a hallmark specimen in the dinosaur museum.

So, for any future building projects, display projects, something like that, make it part of it.

We have the largest dinosaur in the state of Wyoming and the smallest dinosaur in the state of Wyoming.

So, that's kinda cool.

That's good bookends.

- [Narrator] Each day the Wyoming Dinosaur Center provides the unique opportunity for visitors to discover the next important piece of the paleolithic record.

That, coupled with their mission to keep Wyoming discoveries in Wyoming, makes it a true gem that the state can be proud of.

- [Narrator] We're the ones who say, we don't care how much experience you have.

We don't care what your age is.

Come out here and we'll show you what it is to dig up dinosaurs.

- There's enough dig sites and specimens to work on here for the next 100 years, easily.

So, we find new sites almost every year, so there's plenty of work to be done.

- So, I like to say, the world knows dinosaurs because of Wyoming and now it's time that Wyoming gets credit for it.

- We dig up bones.

It's hard work.

It takes a while, but it's also really fun and very satisfying when you do find something.

- You never know what the next shovel of stuff's gonna bring out.

It might be the same, something you've seen 1000 times over.

It might be something completely different.

It's the chase.

It's the discovery.

It's the explanation, and it's fun.

It's fun.

- If you've seen the movie "Jurassic Park", one of the very first scenes in the dessert, where they have the big, beautiful dinosaur skeleton that's all perfectly articulated and they're just digging some dust out.

It's almost never like that in real life.

- [Julie] This is such a complicated project because of how you have to get into the site.

- We're in a remote location here.

It's at least 45 minutes to the bottom of the hill.

So we are looking at potential helicopter rescue if there's anything serious.

- [Julie] It takes a lot of faith and a lot of trust and it is a very dark and deep hole.

Since there's no other way to get in, you have to repel in on a single rope.

And then you have to ascend out using hand ascenders and your own steam.

- [Narrator] Located northeast of Lovell, in the Bighorn Mountains, Natural Trap Cave was first explored by paleontologists during the 1970's, but has since been sealed by the Bureau of Land Management to preserve the remaining fossils.

Today, with the development of new paleontological methods and techniques, including the discovery of ancient DNA, there's been renewed interest in Natural Trap Cave.

In 2014, Dr. Julie Meachen began a three year expedition with a new team of scientists and volunteers to collect pristine fossils and other organic material they'll use to get a better understanding of Wyoming's past.

- Natural Trap Cave is a really important fossil site.

Not only because of the quantity of fossils that are coming up, but also because of the preservation of the fossils.

This site can really inform of us of not only changes in genetic variability in the animals, but also of the environment in Northern Wyoming during the last ice age.

In terms of fossil material, we're looking for diagnostic pieces.

We need to be able to identify the species that it came from and the body part that it came from.

- It's in three pieces.

- [Julie] Oh, it's in three pieces, wow.

- [Assistant] But they're well fitting pieces.

- They are.

This is another proximal metipodial otatpt.

When we have a lot of people down here, as a team leader, my job is basically to run around and manage everybody, help the volunteers identify specimen.

Nice, that's definitely a carnivore.

Looks like a wolf, yeah.

- You're digging for fossils, most of the time you don't find anything.

You're just digging through all the dirt and all you're finding is more dirt and rocks.

But when you see a piece of bone sticking out of the ground, that's extremely exciting.

So see how it's broken right there?

So what I'm trying to do is not break that more.

So I have to be very careful when I'm taking the rocks out.

- The biological gold are the teeth.

So we can really identify species very easily from their teeth.

- [Woman Digger] So that, maybe even could be a tooth.

We'll see once I dig up the ends.

So there's that full little tooth there.

- [Narrator] After the fossils have been dug out of the cave, the work truly begins.

Eight lead scientists, in eight different but related fields, will attempt to correlate all of their respective data to build a complete picture of what the Wyoming environment looked like before the large animal extinction event of 13,000 years ago.

Their findings will hopefully give scientists a better understanding of how the past shaped our current environment and what that can tell us about the future.

- [Julie] So we all know that the cheetah in Africa is the fastest land mammal.

And the pronghorn in North America is a close second.

And that's sort of been a conundrum to scientists.

Why might this be?

Why is there this extremely fast ungulate in North America when there's really not a lot of predators that are fast enough to catch it?

And the reason we think that might be, although it's not proven, is the American cheetah-like cat.

The morphology of this cheetah, or body form of this cheetah-like cat, looks very much like the African cheetah.

It's very tall.

It's very long.

And it likely was very fast.

So this may have been a species that preyed specifically upon the pronghorn antelope.

- How does this relate to what's happening today?

In Africa, for example, we have the innominate extinction of rhinoceroses and we have elephants that are very endangered.

And so what do we expect to see in the type of community?

And there is some evidence that in North America, as you have mammoths going extinct, then what you end up seeing is a real expansion of forest systems because they're no longer being controlled by the megafauna that are on the landscape.

- [Narrator] The cave has already begun to provide a clearer picture of the past.

As Julie and her team published the results of their research, the scientific community will have an opportunity to further update the paleolithic record.

The fossils themselves will find a new resting place in a collection at the University of Wyoming where digital files for 3D printable models will be made available to the public.

The sealed cave will continue to preserve it's treasures for the next generation of scientists who will apply new technologies to recover even more information, advance our understanding of the natural world we inhabit.

- So, what we're known for at Fossil Butte is actually not only the preservation but the diversity and the abundance of fossils that we find here as well.

So, diversity being all sorts of different types of fish, mammals, and turtles, and crocodiles that tell the story of this whole ecosystem that used to be here.

And then we also have the abundance.

There are so many fossils that you can find in this area that it's really some of the best preserved fish fossils in the whole world.

My name is Amanda Wilson.

I'm a supervisory park ranger here at Fossil Butte National Monument.

And today we're going to be walking up the nature trail and checking out our research quarry.

- And I'm Liz Bargdill, and I'm our geo scientist and the park's intern.

When we get up to the research quarry, I will show you all about the fossils that we're finding up there in the rocks we're looking at, which is actually a mass mortality of a school of fish.

- So we're about 10 miles outside of Kemmerer, Wyoming off Highway 30.

We get about 20,000 visitors each year to Fossil Butte National Monument.

Our elevation here at the monument is at about 7,000 feet at the visitor center.

We are a part of a three lake system.

So Fossil Lake is the lake that we have here.

It was a smallest of those lakes and it has the best preserved fossils from that time period.

About 52 million years ago, this whole area was like a subtropical environment, so basically similar to the Gulf Coast or Florida today.

This whole area was basically teeming with life So there were crocodiles, and turtles, and fish all living in this lake, as well as a diverse ecosystem with palm trees and all sorts of tropical plants located outside the shores of the lake.

- Fossil Lake was an alkaline lake.

Think of it as hard water precipitating out of the water and settling on the bottom, creating the laminated limestones that we have.

We've gotten more understanding, as we get more information through the years.

When they first found these deposits and were describing them, Bradley, with the United States Geological Survey, said, "Oh, these fish can't live here "because you can't have fish living in a lake "that's precipitating limestone.

"They just can't, the water conditions wouldn't be right."

But the lowly coprolite corrected that.

Fossil fish poo, fossil feces, was found in with these fish.

Very delicate.

You can't get that delicate coprolite to wash out 10 miles from shore, settle to the bottom and still be perfectly articulated.

That told them the fish were actually living here in the lake, which then begged the question, how?

Through time, using evidences like volcanic ash beds that in the middle lake are preserved as a case bar alteration near shore, they're clay.

So that's telling you the same ash is preserving differently, and that's an indication with that case bar alteration in the middle lake, that there was salt water at the base of the lake in the center and fresh above that all the way across the lake.

So as fish were living in the fresh, albeit alkaline water up above, and we have salty water down below.

When they died and went to the bottom, you had this barrier for scavenging, barrier for microbes that protected them on the bottom in that saltier water.

- One of the things people come here to see are the incredible fossils that we have here at Fossil Butte.

The best place to do that is actually in our visitor center.

And some of the fossils that you can see in the visitor center are a 13 foot crocodile, or a crocodilian, I should say.

Turtles, we have turtles on display.

A horse, an early horse from the Eocene era and many different kinds of fish.

- The visitors center was built and dedicated in 1990 and no major or a significant additions to the exhibits were done for 20 years.

In 2010, I added this case, four other cases, increased the number of fossils on exhibit from 80 to over 300 fossils on exhibit.

At the same time, some of these other cases in the room we changed out.

So we keep trying to keep things current, keep things up to date as we have the funds in project money.

- So on Fridays and Saturdays during the summer months visitors are able to come up this trail and visit me in the research quarry where they can help participate in gathering research.

So I put a pencil and notebook in their hand and they help me document information about fossils.

So all sorts of information, such as length, side, articulation, orientation, visitors can expect to help in.

Here's we're looking at the layer that I am working on.

The rock that you're seeing right in front of us used to be the bottom of this ancient fossil lake.

So we are looking at about 52 million year old rock and also fossils.

Now the rock that you're looking at is a fine sedimentary rock.

Think of a bottom of a lake; it's very silty and soft.

Now, the fossils that you're seeing in here are slightly hidden, but all of the numbers and boxes that you see right now, these are indicating fossils that we have here on this layer right now.

And every number is a fossil.

So we have actually been working up here in the research quarry for 21 years.

This is the 21st year someone has been up here documenting data on fossils in these layers.

And each of these layers are given a number.

Currently, this very thin layer that we're seeing right now is called the 128 layer and it is paper thin.

And so I'm looking for fossils on and within this 1/8 of an inch fossil-rich layer.

And so when visitors come up and see that process in the research quarry firsthand, they do have a better appreciation of what we have here and why we have them in the visitor center for them to see.

- Yeah, so one of the big challenges we have is how to be relevant for people.

We're a small national monument, so it can be challenging sometimes for people to hear about us when they think of Yellowstone and Grand Tetons.

So it's how to be relevant for people who are traveling through this area who may have never heard of Fossil Butte before, or never thought of stopping here So many national parks and monuments obviously do charge fees, and we are one that does not.

So we are all together in the National Park Service are funded through the Department of the Interior, so our funding comes from a lot of different places and doesn't necessarily have to come from fees.

So we're able to not have an entrance fee here at Fossil Butte.

The summer is definitely our busiest time here where we get the majority of our visitors and we have the most services available.

Those include ranger programs that are available daily that you can come in and request a program with a ranger.

We do different walks and talks so you can learn more about the monument.

We also have our fossil preparation demonstrations that happen during the summer months which actually show you the process of creating a beautifully-displayed fossil and how how we go about doing that.

The fall and spring are more of our shoulder season where we have some limited services but we're still open daily.

In the winter, we have the least amount of services but otherwise we're entirely open for visitors to come here and experience the visitor center and have opportunities like cross country skiing or snowshoeing.

Fossil Butte became a national monument in 1972.

It was established by an Act of Congress.

And basically it was a way to preserve this part of the fossil lake sediments as an area that could be preserved and protected for future generations.

Definitely, the reaction that we get from people who come here is, "This is an amazing place," and they've may have never heard of it before.

They're really surprised to find it right in their backyard.

(gentle music) - I'm the superintendent of beautiful Sinks Canyon State Park here in Lander, Wyoming.

I want to welcome everybody to one of the hidden jewels of Sinks Canyon, Boulder Choke Cave.

(stirring music fades) (gentle music) The phenomenon of the Sinks and the Rise is really awesome.

The Popo Agie River totally disappears in a limestone cavern, and then it journeys underground for an eighth of a mile to the Rise.

We take tours in the cave, and me and my staff are really excited to show you guys around.

You know, Boulder Choke Cave, when you walk up to the cave itself, it just looks like a set of boulders.

- [Skyler] Careful of the ice coming down here.

Watch your step.

- And we have a gate there, 'cause we have to keep this cave locked.

For one thing, this cave actually floods out every summer.

Basically you have a gate that you climb down into.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) And then there's about a 25 foot crawl.

And then basically you can stand up, and you're actually in the Boulder Choke.

- [Skyler] So now we're in the main passage of Boulder Choke Cave, and we'll actually be following these passages all the way down to the river.

And the first thing you see when you come in here are the limestone walls.

If you look close to the texture of the walls, you can see all the scalloping within the limestone.

And as the water travels through, it'll just erode and erode away, forming this very unique texture.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music intensifies) (upbeat music continues) We just came down our only manmade structure in the cavern, the rope, down to what we call the Grand Canyon of the cavern.

And if you look up, this is actually the tallest room that we have here, reaches about 20 feet.

And you can start to see how the rock is layering.

(upbeat music) And so the last of the glaciers were seeded out of this canyon, 15 to 17,000 years ago.

It was actually called the Pleistocene glaciation period.

And when it receded, it uncovered the Sinks and the Rise, and that allowed a bunch of water to flow through, and leave behind this entire cavern for us to explore.

(upbeat music) And you'll notice that we're standing on silt, and as the water floods this entire cavern, every single year, it picks up all the sediment and redeposits it throughout the entire cavern.

And so what you'll find are new passages opening up and old ones closing every year.

And so every time we come through, it's a whole new experience.

- For a long time, they didn't know if it was the same water that came in from the Sinks that came up to the Rise.

And in 1983, they did an official dye test.

- [Researcher] We're attempting to find out if the water that goes into the Sinks is the same flow that comes out below.

- [Reporter] Is this dye safe?

- [Researcher] Yes, it's been tested all over the United States.

It's never had any problems at all.

What you can get with the dye is an exact simulation of what's happening in a water body.

Now, the test results consist mainly of the travel time of the dye from the place where we put it in, at the Sinks, to the Rise, where we were able to detect it.

The travel time was about two hours for the dye to first start showing up in the Rise.

And our sampling shows that it took about three to four hours to completely pass, so that there was no more dye left in the pool.

(water rushes) - [Jamie] What we're seeing now is the Popo Agie River running right through the middle of Boulder Choke Cave.

(upbeat music) - And so if you look behind me here at the Popo Agie River, you really see the bulk of the river coming through.

And right now it's running at about 30 cubic feet per second, but during the summer months it can get up to 1,000.

And so this entire area is gonna be completely flooded with water here in a few months.

This is honestly the furthest down the river that we've been able to explore.

Down this cavern behind me, we've been able to send divers, however once they get around this corner, it cuts off.

And so we haven't been able to explore between here and the Rise, which is what really makes this cave one of the greatest mysteries of the canyon is why it takes so long to get from here down to the Rise.

And we have theories of cracks and fissures.

But in all honesty, it's just really hard to determine what's happening down there.

- And like I said, we don't have it all figured out yet, but there're really interesting phenomenons that are going on here in the cave.

It's a living, breathing thing.

(upbeat music) It's great to take school tours in here.

You know, you get a class of third graders or seventh graders that have never been in this cave environment, and turn off the lights into total darkness, physically challenge them.

When they come out of Boulder Choke Cave, a lot of times it changes their whole perspective on not only Sinks Canyon, but of their abilities, and what they've just seen.

(upbeat music) I'm actually from Lander.

I was maybe four or five years old the first time I saw the Rise, and fed the fish.

So it's an amazing place, it's 600 acres, but it's a jewel of Wyoming.

It's such a diverse area with different habitats.

You know, it's my pleasure and my joy to be able to work here, to protect, to inspire, to educate people about this wonderful area, and about all the things that we love and that we do here in Sinks Canyon.