Great Plains Dinosaur Museum - Leonardo's Hometown

Photo: Royalbroil, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)

A stop on American Prairie: Rewilding the Plains, a free self-guided tour.

Walk across the parking lot and you are at a working dinosaur lab. The Great Plains Dinosaur Museum and Field Station shows fossils dug from the rock around Malta, and its name is a clue: this is a place where bones get found, cleaned and studied, not just displayed.

The local celebrity is Leonardo, a young Brachylophosaurus found north of town in July 2000 in the Judith River Formation. He lived about 77 million years ago, and roughly 90 percent of his skeleton is wrapped in fossilized skin, scales and muscle, which earned him a Guinness listing as the most complete dinosaur mummy known. Back then this prairie was a warm coastal plain beside an inland sea.

Ask staff which specimens are on view and what is being worked on in the lab. The museum keeps summer hours and opens by appointment in the off-season, so check its website before you go. Then think about time as you head out: dinosaurs, then bison, then us.

Getting here: It is right next door to the Phillips County Museum, a short walk west across the shared parking lot.

Did you know?: Leonardo was found by a visitor from Minot, North Dakota, who spotted part of his tail and pelvis weathering out of a sandstone bank - and the dinosaur was only about three or four years old when he died.

Photo op: Stand a member of your group beside the biggest skeleton on display for a picture that shows just how large these plant-eaters grew.

More on Wikipedia: Great Plains Dinosaur Museum and Field Station · Brachylophosaurus · Judith River Formation

Great Plains Dinosaur Museum - Leonardo's Hometown

Stops on this tour