Duck-billed dinosaur returns to Makoshika State Park

A dinosaur fossil is back in eastern Montana after experts rescued it from collapsing into a sinkhole.

Paleontologists concluded two years of conservation work in late July when they returned the fossil of a hadrosaur to Makoshika State Park near Glendive.

Museum of the Rockies curator of paleontology John Scannella says the dinosaur lived during the Cretaceous period 100 to 66 million years ago when Montana was still a swampy landscape.

“They’re known for their duck-like bills unlike modern ducks, their mouths were filled with hundreds of tiny teeth that were good for grinding up vegetation, so they were a very successful group of plant-eating dinosaurs and some Hadrosaurs get very very big,” said Scannella.

Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks requested the Museum of the Rockies’ help in extracting the at-risk fossil from along one of their trails.

“This particular fossil has some impressions of the bone and in other places there are parts of the bone still there,” said Scannella.

Scannella says in their Bozeman lab they worked to strengthen the artifact’s structural integrity and created a base to support its weight. The hadrosaur is now on display in the Makoshika State Park visitor center.