It was wind still this morning , so the lake was very reflective, and there is now a dusting of snow on the peaks that wasn’t there yesterday. That last sleeting rain must have been snow at the higher elevations.

We headed into Bozeman to see the Museum of the Rockies which is affiliated with Montana State University and the Smithsonian. It’s always nice to see a museum that displays current research and has some of the displays temporarily off sight due to that ongoing research. I love dinosaur exhibits, and I love them even more when I learn new things.

Identifying new species using the fossil record is difficult and ideas change with more and new evidence. That’s the way science works. This museum is interested in growth and development of dinos, so they work to get juvenile skeletons to study, when other museums tend to pick the large, impressive adults for display. That has lead to understanding herd dinosaurs with a social structure had features that helped identify juveniles that hadn’t reached sexual maturity just like modern animals. Some separate species are now understood to be juvenile members of a bigger, adult species.

Large top predators tend to be rare in number within an ecosystem as it takes a lot to feed them. T-Rex is relatively common, leading to hypotheses that they filled a similar niche as hyenas where they were opportunistic feeders and not always hunters.

Bob Harmon, a fossil prepper for this museum was on a dig when he climbed a short cliff to eat lunch. He found a T-Rex toe bone sticking out of the cliff above him, but couldn’t reach the area. Two years later, with the help of some rock climbing dinosaur enthusiasts, B-Rex was ready to be air-lifted out to MOR. But the plaster jacket containing the bones was too heavy for the helicopter. Cutting it down to size, lead to a huge discovery. Inside a cut femur, blood vessels and cells were found. This soft tissue discovery has now been repeated and is changing fossilization understanding. Jurassic Park, here we come:)

They also found tissue that provides calcium for the egg shell in B-Rex, which means she was female.

There were other exhibits in the museum, but I spent the most time with those dinosaurs.