This Side of the Pond

The Casper Star Tribune published a lovely article last week about a 66-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex called Lee – the only T. rex skeleton found in this state that will be staying in Wyoming for good.

In the article, Russell Hawley of the Tate Geological Museum is quoted as saying, “Wyoming has a long history of being a T. rex exporting state. So we’re trying to reverse that trend.”  It also mentions that the very first T. rex found in this state is currently residing in London.

I did not know this, so I went on the hunt for more information. The T. rex was discovered by Barnum Brown himself, the famous Mr. Bones, all the way back in 1900, and was sold to the British Museum of Natural History about 60 years later. I’ve seen that T. rex in person, but I didn’t absorb the information about its origins as I was probably too busy being alarmed by the size of its teeth.

As it turns out, I’ve somehow managed to avoid noticing that Britain has a strong relationship with the dinosaurs found in Wyoming and our surrounding states, though it turns out I’ve been enjoying this unspoken nationwide obsession all along.

For instance, on Christmas Day, 2000, I lounged on the sofa with my parents and watched a special episode of the BBC’s much-loved series, “Walking With Dinosaurs.” When the series first aired the year before, it used CGI and animatronics to create a dino experience almost as amazing as “Jurassic Park.”

Like most computer-generated graphics of that time, it hasn’t aged well, and you can spot a few instances where the dinosaur heads are basically sock puppets, but at the time it was like nothing I’d seen on television before. It was a nature documentary, but for creatures that have been extinct for many millennia.

It was narrated by the wonderful Kenneth Branagh, who described individual moments in the life of dinosaur “characters.” He’d tell us if the dinosaur was tired, or if it hadn’t managed to find food that day, and other tidbits that were presented as though the dinos were actually being filmed in the wild (prompting frequent exclamations from the sofa of, “But Kenneth, how do you know!”)

The Christmas special was titled, “The Ballad of Big Al,” and it began with footage of dinosaur bones at a university. What I didn’t realize until now is that the location was none other than the University of Wyoming and Big Al is the allosaurus discovered in the Big Horn Basin.

The special was somewhat depressing, because nothing good ever seemed to happen to Big Al. He was constantly injuring himself and didn’t even make it to adulthood, which appears to be exactly what happened to the real version – his skeleton includes more than 20 injured bones, so the poor guy clearly had two left feet.

Then there’s Stan. If you ever find yourself in the north of England, in the City of Manchester, pop along to the local museum to find a cast of what is currently billed as the fifth most intact T. rex skeleton ever found.

You might well feel the thrill of recognition, because it’s possible you’ve seen Stan before. The same cast is on display at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis.

Stan was found near Buffalo in South Dakota in 1987 by the conveniently named Stan Sacrison, amateur paleontologist, who was freelancing for the Black Hills Geological Institute.

Back in the Natural History Museum in London, you’ll find Sophie the stegosaurus (I have to say, it really was thoughtful of our dinosaur predecessors to pick names we’d find so easy to pronounce.) You’ll also find a virtual reality version of Sophie, which wanders around in cyberspace while the legendary Sir David Attenborough explains how she would have moved.

Sophie was discovered in 2003 by Bob Simon on Red Canyon Ranch and is the most complete stegosaurus skeleton ever found. The museum desperately wanted her for research as well as display, but it took a year of negotiations to acquire her, with the assistance of 70 private donors.

Nearby, you’ll find Dippy the diplodocus, who was unearthed in Albany County in 1899. Apparently, team members who were sent out to dig Dippy up by Andrew Carnegie wanted him to be called “The Star-Spangled Dinosaur,” but it didn’t stick.

Carnegie presented a replica of Dippy to King Edward VII in 1905, and he’s been a beloved feature of the museum ever since. He even went on a national tour back in 2018 – he spent a couple of months presiding over my home county.

As we speak, a team of British paleontologists is partaking in “Mission Jurassic,” a 20-year exploration on a parcel of land in Wyoming. In a project led by the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, they are excavating in the Morrison and Sundance formations.

It’s the biggest dinosaur hunt the Brits have been on in decades, and the scientists are beside themselves with excitement. So far, the square mile they’re focusing on within the Badlands has been utterly riddled with bones.

“There’s probably enough dinosaur material here to keep a thousand paleontologists happy for a thousand years,” said Phil Manning, one of the scientists currently brushing away at the topsoil. It seems that Wyoming doesn’t plan to stop thrilling the Brits with its fossil collection any time soon.