Badlands Dinosaur Museum

Dickinson, North Dakota sits on some of the richest dinosaur fossil ground in North America. The Hell Creek and Lance formations underlying the Badlands here have yielded tyrannosaurs, triceratops, and duck-billed hadrosaurs for over a century. The Badlands Dinosaur Museum, part of the Dickinson Museum Center, grew out of the privately run Dakota Dinosaur Museum, which opened in the early nineteen nineties, to display what crews have pulled from the ground nearby.

The region's paleontological history goes back to the eighteen seventies, when survey teams following the railroads west first documented the bones eroding from the gullied badlands. Today the museum holds thousands of rock, mineral, and fossil specimens, including a complete Triceratops skeleton, and allows visitors to watch preparators work on new finds behind glass. The Lance Creek beds of the Dakotas and Wyoming have produced more complete late-Cretaceous specimens than almost anywhere else on earth.