- See the big guy behind me?

That's an Allosaurus, the Apex Predator of the Jurassic Period.

He's new to the Wyoming Dinosaur Center, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.

The center's changed a lot in three decades, meaning it's getting better and better and better.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS.

This is Wyoming Chronicle.

(gentle music) The realization in the 1990s that a section of rocky dried land near Thermopolis was an enormous trove of fossilized dinosaur bones, led to the creation of the Wyoming Dinosaur Center, a rare pairing of a museum, fossil laboratory, and rich active dig sites, all in one.

Marking its 30th anniversary in 2025, the center has long benefited from the collaboration between its owner and its senior staff member.

Angie Guyon is here with us.

Angie, what's your title with this institution?

- I'm the General Manager.

- General Manager.

- Of Wyoming Dinosaur Center.

Yes.

- Day-to-day operations, here all the time.

- That's correct, yeah.

- Okay.

And Burkhard Pohl, tell us what your affiliation is.

- Well, I'm still the president of Bighorn Prospecting, which is actually doing business at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center.

- Bighorn Prospecting.

So the museum, in other words, is privately owned.

- It's a privately owned business, yes.

- Wyoming, in case people don't know, I think people in Wyoming might or they ought to, tremendous dinosaur state, correct?

- That's correct.

- Lots and lots of dinosaur bones are found, not just around Thermopolis, although this is a great spot as well, but around the state.

- Yes.

- How is it determined where a dinosaur bone, a fossil, an important fossil is exhibited?

If it's not here, it's somewhere else.

It's at the Smithsonian, it's at another state.

How is that determined?

- Well, I mean, you have to distinguish between private and public lands.

- Yes.

- So you cannot collect on public lands.

So the big institutions, they either have a permit to dig themselves in public lands, or they buy it from private collectors.

- Lots of universities and museums have lease agreements with landowners around the state of Wyoming, and they come out for a few weeks during the summertime, do some fossil collecting and take it back to their institutions to put on display.

- The thing that strikes me as distinctive about Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis is the, I guess I'd call the facets of it.

Obviously there's paleontology, geology, there's history, there's preservation, there's excavation, there's exhibiting, there's education, there's tourism.

A little bit of retail as well, all here in one spot.

How unusual is that in the country?

How many places are there like Wyoming Dinosaur Center?

- Not very many.

- No.

- I know about two or three of them, yeah.

- We pride ourselves on offering the public an opportunity to actually go in the field and dig the fossils.

Most places you can't do that, so you can see dinosaurs on display, but you don't get the experience to go to the actual dig site.

- That was actually the whole idea behind having the dinosaur center here is because the dig sites are very close by, not even two miles from here.

And we do have the dig sites tours going out.

- Yes.

- And that's something some advertisement person called it a fresh dinosaur.

(group laughing) That's something that the big museums is that they can't, they can't have that.

- And it's happening today.

- Yes.

- What's a typical excursion to the big site like?

- We have full day programs that run from 8 to 5.

We have half day programs, a morning session, and an afternoon session.

We have kids dig programs, we have generations programs, we have a special teacher's workshop.

We develop lots of programs.

We have a high school program called the Dinosaur Academy that gets those high schoolers that are extremely interested in paleontology.

The opportunity to spend a week with us, sort of in depth learning about paleontology so they can go into college, you know, having a little bit of knowledge.

- I would think for a high school student who's interested in this topic coming here, it has to be one of the really rare and fantastic opportunities that that student couldn't get in a lot of other, most other places.

- We had kids that came to the kids' digs.

and they are paleontologists today.

So we had a number of those.

- What would I spend the day doing if I were at the dig site as an amateur?

- Well, we start the day with a guided tour of our "Something Interesting" site.

- And that's the official name of it, right?

- Yes, - The SI.

- The SI site, yes.

We believe it was an allosaur feeding site.

So we educate our groups on what we believe happened at this particular site.

Then depending on which dig site they're going to, we take them to the site, give them a brief introduction of what we found at this particular site, show them bones that are exposed, teach them how to use the tools, and they help us dig the fossils.

- They do?

- Yep.

We don't put 'em off in a corner and hope they find something.

They're actually working with us to remove these bones.

- I wondered about that.

They're not just playing in the sandbox.

- No.

- And you haven't salted the area with something that they might find.

- No.

- We don't have to.

- We don't have to.

We have an abundance of dinosaur bones.

Yes.

All of our dig sites have bones exposed.

So while we are working on removing those, we find new bones.

It's an everyday occurrence.

- Really?

So it's no exaggeration to say that amateur paleontologists have come here and found objects that are useful to the museum, add to the body of knowledge, and to the science.

- Yes, absolutely.

- Absolutely.

- Yep.

- If they find something new during their experience, we attach their name to the field sheet, and they call back years later and say, you know, I was there on a dig this time.

We found this bone.

Whatever happened to it, and what was it?

So we go through our collections, we tell them what it is.

It's gone through the prep lab.

It's just wonderful for them.

- Let's talk about the prep lab, then.

When you mention that, the dig sites obviously are outdoors.

There's this great museum space that we're in now, but off camera this direction is this area where spectators can look in and see what?

What's going on there that's different from the dig sites?

- They can see how the bones are consolidated and and prepared.

And unfortunately, a lot of our bones come in encrusted in the concretion.

Concretion is a hardened sandstone.

- I think of the word concrete.

Yes.

- So it takes a lot to take this concretion off and to prepare the bone.

And people like to see something happening.

- It strikes me as some of the most painstaking work I think you could possibly see.

It must take just tremendous patience to do this work.

- Yes, - Correct?

- Yes, it does.

- And it's not for everybody.

- Yeah.

I remember reading a book about the building of the Transcontinental Railroad through the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and there would be days where they would advance two inches through the rock and that was what that day was.

But here, it's much slower than that, even.

- Yeah.

- Yes.

- Maybe sixteenths of an inch, yeah.

- Yes.

We use a variety of tools in the prep lab from dental picks to toothbrushes, air tools.

So depending on the hardness of the rock, depends on what tools, and the experience.

So we have little kids in there that start off small.

- They get the toothbrush, probably.

- They get the toothbrush.

Yes.

- Dr.

Fred Lacomba is the center's chief paleontologist.

He has a global reputation in the field, which is appropriate, because so does the Wyoming Dinosaur Center.

You wanted to start here.

What's significant about this part of the museum?

- This section in the past, the section of the Ceratopsian means the section of the family of the triceratops was a little bit missing something.

And so we were working on a new animal that is actually a Kosmoceratops.

It's only the fourth skeleton found.

And this one is the only found in Wyoming.

And I love it, because look at this skull.

This skull is incredible with the horn bending on each side and especially, you know, the top of the skull going back, looks like a little bit like Elvis, or I dunno.

So I love this guy.

It's an incredible addition to the collection.

- Just to reiterate what you said, only four skeletons known.

- Yeah.

- And this one, which is a great one.

- Yeah.

- Found in Wyoming.

- Found in Wyoming.

- Here's an example of something that when the museum opened 30 years ago, this wasn't here.

- No.

- In fact, just a couple of years ago, it wasn't here, either.

- No.

- Something that's brand new to this.

- Yeah.

- So just arrived actually, probably exactly a year ago.

Exactly a year ago.

It was found, I think, five years ago.

So the time to excavate, to prep, and to mount it.

And then in the museum.

- I know that one of, I'm not saying it's a criticism, but an observation that some people have about a museum is once you've been there, you've seen everything.

Not the case here.

It's changing.

All the time.

- We try to change.

- Yeah.

- We try to change because, you know, science is changing.

So you have new addition.

I can show you, for example, in the marine reptile, we have for a long time marine reptile.

We didn't know what it was.

We knew it was a new species, but we have to study it.

And now we have the name.

So we have to redo the narrative about it because we know the name and more things about it.

And we try to improve it with new skeleton.

It's also because, you know, the moment we're living is very fast.

You know, in the past, we have time to work in museum and to check hundred different teeth of T-Rex or Ceratopsian.

Now you don't need to do that because you have internet, you have everything on your phone.

So we need to find something that can attract people.

And to attract people is to bring something new that they never seen before on their phone or internet.

- Sure.

- That's why we try to have a new dinosaur or a new fossil that is very interesting and very sexy for the public too.

- Sure.

Fred, you just educated me on something and I appreciate it.

- Okay.

- I probably am not alone in thinking that a dinosaur, what I would've called a dinosaur that swims in the ocean.

Or a dinosaur that flies are swimming and flying dinosaurs.

But that's not true, you said - No, so the dinosaur, you called actually is a marine reptile.

A marine reptile is not a dinosaur.

And the pterosaur, which is a flying reptile, is not a dinosaur.

Dinosaur only walk on earth.

- Dinosaur means walks on land.

- Yeah, on land only.

So for example, this one is a marine reptile, but it's not the dinosaur at all.

It's an ichthyosaur.

Looks like a dolphin, but again, it's a reptile.

So it's not the mammal.

And usually this kind of ichthyosaur, they are found and prepped on the slab.

So it's very flat.

- Like that, for example?

- Like this one.

And we have a very good team of preparator in Europe and they were able to make three dimensional ichthyosaur, which is very, very rare and very difficult to do.

And I really wanted to have one in Thermopolis to show how beautiful they are.

How accurate is the preparation is.

You see, like the rib are very seen and the vertebrae, everything is very accurate, very small.

And it's a beautiful specimen.

It's original fossil.

So it's very interesting for me to have these two components in one fossil and to bring it here.

- Now this is in Thermopolis, was brought here, but this was not a fossil found in Wyoming.

- No, this is found in Germany, actually, from a very classic paleontological site called Holzmaden.

- You're an example of it.

Burkhard, who we talked to earlier, is an example of it.

The Wyoming Dinosaur Center is part of this international.

- Yeah.

- Paleontology community.

- Well, you know it's called Wyoming Dino Center because the main focus is on dinosaur and preservation of the dinosaur that we find Thermopolis or as a part of Wyoming.

But for me it's a real natural history museum.

- Yes.

- Because if you start at the entrance, you have the walk through time, and you start with the early life and origin of the trilobite, the ammonite, the plants, the amphibian, and everything.

So for me, it's a real natural history museum.

Not only dinosaur showcase, - I mean in addition to everything else.

It's a scientific installation here.

It's also an important part of the Thermopolis economy, isn't it?

- Yes.

- Visitors come here, they pay money to come here.

- We have international visitors that just come to the United States to come and see us, and come to the dig sites.

- The Wyoming Dinosaur Center is a world class scientific institution.

We bring about $7 million to the Thermopolis economy every year.

We have about 40,000 visitors throughout the year.

Most of them come in the summertime, but 80% of our visitors are specifically coming to Thermopolis for the Wyoming Dinosaur Center.

So they're staying in hotels, they're eating at restaurants, they're buying fuel.

They're really enjoying the rest of what Thermopolis has to offer along with the Wyoming Dinosaur Center.

- Can you estimate the percentage of visitors, for example, who want to go to the dig site compared to just want to look at the skeletons?

Is it the same kind of visitor typically, or or not?

- It's about 35% that just do the dig site tour alone.

We have a lot of families that come in where their children are the dinosaur enthusiasts, and they're very impressive.

They can rattle off names of dinosaurs that I've never even heard of.

And the mom's like.

I don't know where they learned that.

They just one day started talking about it.

So lots of times we have families that come because of their children, but about 35% to 40% of our visitors do the dig site tours.

And those that are on the programs come here specifically for the programs.

- Burka, you told us you were here from the beginning, have been involved from the beginning of the center.

Angie, you've been here for most of it, correct?

- I started in early 2002, yes.

- Have a background in museums?

- I do not.

- Or history or paleontology or anything?

- I do not.

No, graphic design was my background.

I was just hired as an office assistant, and have been here ever since.

- A job you like, I guess, huh?

- Job I love, yes.

- Burkhard, what about you?

Were you a scientist by training or?

- I actually have training in veterinary medicine.

- [Steve] Really?

- And I studied at the University of Bern, Switzerland, and worked a few years at the university after my PhD.

And then- - Your PhD is in what?

- In virology, and then Thermopolis happened on me, and I never practiced as a veterinarian.

- Imagine having been a veterinarian for that animal.

That would've been quite a thing.

It's probably crossed your mind.

What's the workforce?

How many people, typically?

- So typically, we have on staff anywhere between 9 and 30 people, depending on the amount of programs that we're running.

Of course, it's Wyoming.

So our winter season, we slow down quite a bit.

That's the time we focus on the bones that we brought down from the dig sites, our exhibits, things like that.

- Are bones that are found here always displayed here or are they spread out across the nation?

- Well, what I said back then is the first and the best should stay.

- Good.

- Here.

- Good.

- But it takes a long time for the preparation for the reasons that we just talked about.

So, and the only thing that has actually been sold over the years was one Camarasaurus.

We have one standing here, and we don't have room for another one.

So we sold one 15 years ago to the museum in Leon in France.

- Yeah, that's an important consideration, isn't it?

Some dinosaurs are small, some are huge, and they're just only so much you can fit into any space, really, when you're talking about a creature that's 40 feet long or bigger.

- Yes.

- Fred, this is a small part of the museum, but one of the very, very most important ones.

And let me start by saying my ignorant view of it.

- Yeah.

- There's been a general sort of understanding in recent years, I think, that birds and dinosaurs are closely related, and a lot of that has to do with the discovery of this creature.

What are we looking at?

- So we're looking at the Archaeopteryx.

- Archaeopteryx.

- Yeah.

- We were talking about classical paleontological site with Holzmaden.

This is also coming from a very classic paleontological site called Solnhofen in Germany, - [Steve] Okay.

- There's only 14 of them found so far.

And in Thermopolis, we have one of the best preserved one.

So it's part of the collection.

I think it's also one of the most studied Archaeopteryx in private collection.

Because if you see the preservation, you can see the skull is almost complete.

You can see the feathers all around.

- Feathers - So it had feathers?

- Yeah.

All around the body.

And feathers is very important for birds, you know?

- Sure, yes.

- If they wanna fly.

So, and as you said, Archaeopteryx, for a long time, they call it the missing link, like something in between birds and dinosaur.

Which I don't really like, because if you have two points and you create a missing link, then you create two more missing links.

So it's an endless story, you know?

But for me it's an evidence, a proof that birds are dinosaur, or flying reptiles.

- Flying reptiles, thank you.

- Well, actually, they don't come from flying reptiles.

They come really from dinosaur.

- I see.

- From tetrapod.

So I think we can say that birds are dinosaur, they are not flying reptiles.

- If you say it, that's good enough for me.

- Yeah, okay.

Let's keep it like that.

This piece, as you see, it's a very small part of the exhibition in Thermopolis in the Wyoming Dino Center, but it's probably the most scientific important fossil that we have here.

And I'm sure most of the big natural history museum in the States, but also in Europe, they would love to have.

- They would love to have it.

- Yeah.

- But it's gonna stay here, right?

- Yeah.

You know, it's even called the Thermopolis specimen.

- Yes.

- It's here since so many times, so many years.

And it belongs to this place.

So it's never gonna move.

- The museum is changing all the time.

I presume.

You're looking for new things and making room for them when as you're able to.

- We're always improving our exhibits.

We just went through an extensive remodel from last October.

We just reopened in April.

We completely remodeled the inside of the museum, put in new exhibits, new fossils.

We really wanna showcase all that Wyoming has to offer, and frankly, the world has to offer.

- How would you describe the paleontological resource we have here?

- In Wyoming, it's huge.

- Yeah.

- And not only is Wyoming blessed with a lot of fossils, you can also see 'em because you don't have any forest growing on them.

I mean, a lot of fossils in Germany, but you have a quarry because you know, the topsoil may be six feet thick before you can even see anything.

- Not a lot of six foot deep topsoil in Wyoming.

At least in my experience, trying to plant a tree.

Fred, you said something interesting just now about the movie series, "Jurassic Park" that I think everyone is familiar with.

- Yeah.

- And you said one of the great inaccuracies of it was that the big villain was the T-Rex, the Tyrannosaur.

- Yeah.

- And the actual villain, who would've been the villain from the Jurassic period is what we're seeing behind us right now.

What are we looking at here?

- So what we're looking here is an Allosaurus.

So that's the real apex of the Jurassic than the Cretaceous.

T-Rex is from the Cretaceous, but Cretaceous Park is not very nice to hear.

- Cretaceous.

Forgive me, which came first?

- This is much older.

We are talking about 150 million years ago.

Okay, T-Rex is like 70 million years ago only.

Actually, there's less difference between the T-Rex and us right now.

70 million difference, then this guy, and the T-Rex is 80 million.

- So they never knew each other?

- No, of course not.

Like we never meet any T-Rex in our history.

But this one, this allosaur is like, you know, we've been talking about Ceratopsians, which are plant ether.

We talk about marine reptiles in the ocean.

We talk about the Archaeopteryx, maybe flying or something in the air.

But we didn't talk about meat eater.

The real apex, the real predator of the Jurassic, - The very top of the food chain.

- The very top of the food chain.

- All you need to do is look at his teeth - And it's beautiful.

- Beautiful.

- Yeah.

I love it, because it was found like just up on the hill on the museum.

You know, where you can go and dig with your family, for example.

That's where we found this one.

- Wow.

- We call it the Churl the Allosaur, and this is a wonderful specimen that is more or less 70% complete, original bones.

Everything was made in Thermopolis.

We did all the prep and all the mounts in house.

And what is special with it is, that's the first original allosaur we have here.

So I'm very proud of that.

And also it's very big.

It's like 1.5 bigger than any adult allosaur.

But this guy is a juvenile, it's a sub-adult.

So we still have to study it.

Maybe we have something new here.

It's an allosaur, but maybe a different species or something like that.

- Really?

- So we still have to let the science work on that and find something new in Thermopolis, which is great.

- So when you say it's 70% complete, do you expect that the remaining 30% of the bones are still there and waiting to be found?

Or what did you mean by that?

- No, when I say that, you know, you never find hundred percent of a dinosaur.

- Right.

- Because a lot of bones, whether they disappear, they're too fragile to be fossilized.

They're too thin to be fossilized.

And when I say 70% complete, it means that we have 70% of the whole bone count, if you mean like that.

And so the rest of it is most of the times, 3D printed from the guy.

For example, if we have the right femur and we are missing the left one, we can scan the right one and print with a mirror object, the left one.

So that's how we are doing the 30% missing.

So everything can be done here in the Wyoming Dino Center, which is great, I think.

- Looking at this one again, what were some of the best actual fossils that were found?

Teeth or jaws or ribs, or what do you know about that?

- Well, the best thing is to find a skull.

- Yeah.

- If you have a skull, then you can describe the whole skeleton, more or less.

- Yeah.

- But I'm happy also with legs and everything like that.

But yes, skull is is the grail.

At least for this county, that's the biggest one.

And that's the most beautiful one.

- Beautiful.

- I'm so happy with that.

- And he ate what?

- So he ate.

Actually, you just below him, we have a site called SI, which is a scavenger site.

We found his teeth stuck in sauropod bones.

Sauropod is the long neck dinosaur, like diplodocus, apatosaur, camarasaur, So it was scavenging on this body.

And I'm pretty sure it was able also to hunt a little bit the juvenile of this long-necked dinosaur, which are the most common dinosaur you can find in Thermopolis.

The other dinosaur we can find, but it's gonna be more in the south of Wyoming.

It's gonna stegodon, and stegodon is also very nice, but I think, a little bit more dangerous to hunt than a baby camarasaur or apatosaur.

- Stegosaur so has the big spikes on his tail.

- Yeah.

- And knew how to use them.

- Yeah.

So it's a little bit more than dangerous than a long-necked sauropod juvenile.

Yeah.

- Well, I'm glad that you told us about him.

Glad he's here.

Glad he was found here.

- Yeah.

- Great.

- We try to keep most of the things we find in Thermopolis in the Wyoming Dino Center.

And to bring some more fossil, more as we speak the last hour, but new things every year.

- Sure, sure.

- We try to work on that.

- Well, thanks for showing.

Dr.

Lacomba, great pleasure meeting you.

- Nice to meet you.

too.

- And I hope everyone who comes here gets a chance to speak to you.

I don't think that's gonna be true, but I'm very glad.

- Maybe.

- Very glad that we did today.

- I hope you come next year and I show you the next fossil.

- Okay, great.

Thanks for being with us on "Wyoming Chronicle."

- Thank you.

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