Bones in the Badlands: The Dakota Dinosaur Museum

The badlands around Dickinson are not just scenery. They are an open-air fossil bed, one of the richest in the world, and what erodes out of those painted buttes every spring is the record of a world that vanished sixty-six million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period.

The geologic formation responsible is called the Hell Creek Formation, a layer of mudstone and sandstone deposited by rivers and floodplains in the last few million years before the mass extinction that killed the non-avian dinosaurs. Hell Creek outcrops stretch across eastern Montana, the western Dakotas, and northeastern Wyoming, and it has produced more Tyrannosaurus rex specimens than any other formation on earth. It is also the source of Triceratops, Edmontosaurus, Ankylosaurus, and scores of other species.

The Dakota Dinosaur Museum in Dickinson opened in nineteen ninety-four with the specific mission of displaying what had been found locally rather than shipping specimens to distant natural history institutions. It holds seven full-size mounted dinosaur skeletons, including a Triceratops and a Pachycephalosaurus, along with hundreds of individual bones and eggs. Several of the specimens were found within a short drive of the museum. Staff and volunteers from the museum have participated in active dig seasons in the Badlands, contributing to ongoing paleontological research.

What makes the collection distinctive is its regional specificity. Many of the country's largest natural history museums display Hell Creek dinosaurs dug from this same corner of the northern plains but housed thousands of miles away. The Dakota Dinosaur Museum is the rare case of the fossils staying close to home, in the community that lives on top of the formation that produced them. In the exhibition halls you can see fossils, skeletons, and models drawn from the same northern plains badlands you drove through to get here.