Montana is big-boned, but few show interest Montana is big-boned, but too few show interest

RUDYARD – Two or three times a year, Lila Redding and her family comb their backyard, competing to see who finds the best dinosaur bone.

Ordinary bones won’t win. It has to be a skull or special teeth.

It isn’t unusual to see dinosaur ribs jutting out from an eroding bank in Redding’s farm north of Rudyard. Most dinosaurs aren’t as easy to find, but in the Hi-Line’s badlands, they are plentiful.

Trees, mountains and minerals are western Montana’s natural resources. The same can be said about eastern Montana’s dinosaurs.

“This is the best place in the world to study dinosaurs,” said paleontologist Jerry Jacene, who came to the Makoshika Dinosaur Museum in Glendive after years of digging in Minnesota and the Dakotas.

Beneath the dirt, rocks and grass that cover eastern Montana, thousands, if not millions, of fossilized dinosaur bones lie waiting to be discovered.

Some are new species never seen by man. Others have answered questions that have plagued scientists since the first fossilized bones were found.

But surprisingly few people are looking.

“There are millions of acres of land out there and only a hundred paleontologists,” said David Trexler, who with his mother, Marion Brandvold, found the world’s first baby dinosaur bones at Egg Mountain near Choteau.

He is one of perhaps a half-dozen paleontologists who make Montana home.

The first dinosaurs discovered in the Western Hemisphere were found north of Lewistown in 1855. Ever since, Montana’s dinosaurs have been filling museums around the world.

Nearly 50 kinds of dinosaurs have been uncovered in Montana.

Led by paleontologist Jack Horner, the Museum of the Rockies has dig sites near Jordan, Rudyard, Malta and Choteau, where 32 people are doing field work this year. Those scientists and students come from as far as England, Germany, Mongolia, Japan and Italy to dig in the dirt and study Montana’s dinosaurs.

With so few paleontologists, many undiscovered fossils are destroyed each year by weather and erosion.

Scientists estimate that only 5 percent to 10 percent of all dinosaur species have been unearthed.

Most dinosaurs buried under grass and wheat will never be found. The same erosion that reveals them – making the badlands a dinosaur hot spot – washes them away.

In the fall, when Fresno Reservoir near Havre recedes, dinosaur bones can be seen on the banks.

In 1902, the world’s first tyrannosaurus rex was found just south of Fort Peck Reservoir.

In 1978, Trexler and his mother were roaming about the Choteau area looking for dinosaurs, a long-held family hobby. She found several tiny fossils and knew immediately that they belonged to a baby dinosaur.

What they didn’t know is that a baby dinosaur had never before been unearthed. Further digging revealed nests, eggs, more babies, young duckbills and adults.

For two years, the state tourism office has provided dinosaur museums in the state a little publicity, putting together brochures and the Montana Dinosaur Trail Web site. The museums can afford little publicity themselves.

Museums in Malta, Rudyard, Havre, Fort Peck and Glendive dot northern Montana, and dinosaur lovers are stopping at every spot.

“I’ve been wanting to do this forever,” said Dave McLean, who spent a week digging and scraping bones in Malta.

The Vermont man stopped at every dinosaur museum on his way to see his son in Bozeman, taking home a predator tooth and a chunk of hadrosaur femur.

“These are meaningless to these scientists, but for me they’re absolutely special things,” he said.