Visiting Hell's Aquarium

My last stop on the Montana Dinosaur Trail is in the town of Malta at the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum. I had heard good things about this place, but it completely blew me away. Lucky for me, their director of paleontology, Jeremiah Robinson, was there to show me around. Our tour begins where all life begins in the oceans. Map here of what Earth looked like 77 million years ago. This would have been in the Cretaceous, which is where we find a lot of our dinosaurs. Here at the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum, Malta right here. there is a whole marine fauna living in between those different continents. Seeing animals from both sides, plants from both sides. I like to describe the western interior seaway as hell's aquarium. Like for most people and especially small children is the Placenticeras here. Hand for scale. Ammonites get bigger. Are you for real? Ammonite diversity is amazing because you get again ammonites from huge to like that big. You've got to have something that they're eating and something eating on them. And a lot of that is going to be fish. Sharks have been around for way longer than dinosaurs have. They've been around since the Deonian, hundreds of millions of years ago. Dinosaurs were around for 180 million years. Sharks lap that. Cartilage doesn't really preserve well in the fossil record. Most of what we find of sharks are going to be their teeth. Because their teeth are so informative, we can actually split them into different groups, even down to the species level. There's megalodons, big tooth, that's from the measine. That's not even around the time of the dinosaurs. It really shows you how successful an animal is in evolution. There's these things we call Lagerstätten, which is just a fancy German way of saying 'exceptional preservation. ' Here in Montana, we have a lagerstätten. You can see how they would have been oriented in life. You can even see scales on some of them. So, a lot of this happens from pressed down pretty rapidly by a lot of things like volcanic ash or the very large flash flood. So, they're covered and they are able to preserve things that we normally don't get to preserve. That's amazing. Mhm. Looked at all this marine stuff. When are we going to get to the dinosaur part of the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum? This whole time we were just talking about this stuff. I didn't even realize you had a giant triceratops in the back there. Yeah. This is our good friend Herb, our baby triceratops Basil. Cute. We have the ontogyny or growth and development of these guys. Younger triceratops like Basil will have shorter horns. Obviously, their horns are curved upwards. As they start to grow, their horns face more forward. These bones on the outside of the frill are getting reabsorbed by the body allows for more calcium and bone growth in other places as well. You're in many ways a detective. Take a bunch of clues from supporting evidence and come to very logical conclusions from that. Seeing the growth, behavior, development, we can actually still observe on their skeletons. I think is the cool part of paleontology.