The Dino Adventure Begins

Today, we checked out of the hotel and took a scenic drive through the Black Hills National Forest on our way to Casper Wyoming, via Hill City, South Dakota. The kids chose to make a stop at the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research and Museum of Natural History. Not quite the Field Museum in size (not by a long shot), but they had a wide variety of specimens (dinos, fish, ammonites and other ancient sea creatures, and prehistoric mammals.) One display was devoted to the "Sue" controversy. Apparently, the Institute had an agreement with the property owners to dig up "Sue", but then the Feds got involved and nullified this agreement, which led to the land owner auctioning off this fantastic T-Rex specimen, which led to the Field Museum paying a record price for the fossil - setting a terrible precident. At least this is their version of the story:) Mark did some shopping in the gift shop getting a t-shirt, a poster of geological history (I know, snoresville to many of you, but right up his alley) and a book on dino-digging travel.

After a walk through Hill City, watching the wall-to-wall bikers, we decided it was time to escape the noise and continue on to Wyoming. We emerged from the beautiful Black Hills to an endless sea of grassland and scrub land, only to be broken up by some mesas and other land formations. At last, we arrived at our hotel in Casper, looking forward to taking a relaxing dip in the pool after all that driving, only to find out that it is under construction to make way for the coming water park. Meghan decided that this chain should be called the "Worst Western."

Tomorrow, we head to the Glenrock Paleontological Museum for our dino dig day.