Choteau, Montana

Choteau, the seat of Teton County, is a small ranch town at the foot of the Rocky Mountain Front with an outsized claim to paleontological history. Not far from town lies Egg Mountain, a landmark site in North America for dinosaur egg fragments, nests, and hatchlings found together in one place. In nineteen seventy-eight, a local rock shop owner named Marion Brandvold found tiny bones eroding out of the Two Medicine Formation.

Paleontologists Jack Horner and Bob Makela identified them as baby duck-billed dinosaurs, Maiasaura, the good mother lizard, and confirmed that these animals nested in colonies, cared for their young, and returned to the same nesting sites year after year. The discovery rewrote the textbooks on dinosaur behavior. Maiasaura became Montana's official state fossil.

Choteau's Old Trail Museum sits on the Montana Dinosaur Trail and tells the full story of what turned out to be one of the most consequential fossil sites in the world.