While in Casper we decided to visit the Tate Geological Museum that is associated with Casper College. It is a natural history museum with over 3000 specimens. Their biggest attraction is Dee the mammoth an 11,600 year old Columbian mammoth that was discovered in Wyoming. It was discovered in 2006 when work was being done on a new oil well site. The work was stopped then moved a little further away to allow researchers to investigate the find and eventually recover it.
It was donated to the museum for restoration and has become their main attraction. The actual skeleton is not 100% intact, they had to make a few replacement parts and in a few cases some of the very fragile bones are in a separate display.
They had a guide in the musuem that was full of knowledge, he actually works in the geology department at the college. He was guiding a group around with young kids and the place is so small you can hear him in the entire room. He is excellent with kids, dealing with all their questions.
In addition to Dee the museum is currently working on the skeleton of Lee Rex a T Rex that was also found in Wyoming. They generally named the speciemen after the name of the land owner where it was found. Lee Rex is still in the lab area but if you request they will take you to the lab. One of the families there asked about the lab and the guide gave an announcement that he was taking a tour over there if anyone wanted to join. Of course all 4 groups in the museum took off with him.
The lab was little warm but again the guide was very good and entertaining. One of the little girls there with her family paid attention to everything he said and asked very good follow up questions. We learned all about how the T Rex was found, how it was recovered and the issue with storing it because of it’s size. They actually had this lab built specifically for it in 2017 thanks to donations. He offered everyone the opportunity to touch one of the bones on the skeleton that was not real fragile.
They only have the torso of the T Rex and are working with another college that might have other T Rex parts that they can copy to make a full skeleton. All of this a very slow process, they want to recover the bones with minimal damage. We saw one exhibit in the museum where it took one of the ladies around 2000 hours to slowly glue back together a major bone. If you like jigsaw puzzles, this would be the place to work (my sister Dora should get a job here).
The museum was a nice change up, interesting to see all the fossils and see partial remains of other types of dinosaurs. Apparently Wyoming has lots of dinosaur sites and there is a road trip that is mapped for you to see the best locations. One of the families visiting at the same time as us mentioned the road trip they were doing with their kids. I think I need to suggest that my sister Wanda take her grandson Reid on a road trip to Wyoming. Of course you would need to brings lots of money so you can purchase all the souvenirs they have in the museum.