It’s the smallest community on the Montana Dinosaur Trail but it boasts the largest and the smallest of exhibits.
Bynum is a small town even by Montana standards—less than 50 people call it home. The Trexler family did and that’s why Dave Trexler located the Montana Dinosaur Center here. You can’t miss the large dinosaur skulking in Bynum along Highway 89.
Bynum sits on the Two Medicine Formation, one of the very rich paleontology regions in Montana.
It’s the philosophy of the museum that fossils found in the Two Medicine stay here.
Like the very significant fossil find–small in size but large in significance– found quite by accident there in Teton County by Marian Brandvold Trexler, founder Dave Trexler’s mom.
Museum paleontologist Andy Rich picked up the story.
“She got bored with just excavating an adult and wanted to take a walk. Dave and his wife, Lori, go over after an hour trying to find her. Turns out she was just sitting on a hillside collecting baby fossils,” Rich said.
It was quite a find because no one had ever found baby dinosaur fossils before.
It turns out the soil content of the Two Medicine is very neutral and is kind to those small bones and is not going to dissolve them like other soils.
The soil is kind to dinosaur eggs as well.
“That’s also why we are one 7 locations worldwide with mass egg deposits. It’s nice chemistry,” Rich added.
Keeping watch over the baby dinosaur and a nest of eggs is the world’s longest dinosaur model.
“She’s 137-feet long. There is some debate if her tail would be as flexible as shown with all the curves. We don’t have a 137 feet long museum so we have to cheat a little bit,” said Rich.
“She” is a realistic bone sculpture of a seismosaurus found in New Mexico. The skeleton sculpture lurking along the ceiling of the facility was made in Bynum by founder Trexler.
There are plenty of fossils to be found on the Two Medicine formation and the museum takes advantage by offering a variety of digs, including multi-day digs.
“You know we’re not like Jurassic Park and we brush aside some sand there is perfectly preserved dinosaur with all of the bones there. We are putting back together fragments. We are mapping where they are coming from. We are encasing them in plaster for safe transport,” Rich said.
They also offer shorter digs because not everyone has two weeks to give over to a dig.
“So we do our day digs, where people can join us and we will teach them more or less everything we do in the field in a day. We get your hands dirty and everything we do,” said Rich.
They offer even shorter ones.
“We have a shorter one, our half day which are not really digs but we teach you to prospect—the act of looking for fossils, as well as provide several very fun tour stops of dig sites that we formally worked on as well as some exciting little secrets,” Rich said.
The paleontologists at the museum are rather protective of Montana fossils, not just ones found in the Two Medicine formation.
Montana Dinosaur Center President Steve Dogiakos says fossils discovered in Montana belong in Montana.
“There have been a lot of institutions over the years including our very own baby dinosaur fossils that get sent out of state. That Montanans have to travel to Washington DC, or Chicago or Germany to go and visit our fossils. So we believe that policy steps should be taken to keep fossils in Montana,” said Dogiakos.
“ We do not have specific plan on what that looks like but we do want them to stay here, stay in Montana institutions so that Montanans can enjoy them and them when ppl come to enjoy our beautiful national parks they can enjoy them as well.”
The Montana Dinosaur Center in Bynam is on Highway 89 in Teton County in north central Montana and is open 7 days a week from 9 am to 6 pm from the Friday of Memorial Day weekend until Labor Day. September hours are 10 am to 5pm Wednesday through Sunday.
