Dinosaurs made lovely mums

Wikipedia will tell you that Bozeman is a city Gallatin County, Montana, United States.

I’ll tell you that Bozeman is a cleverville.

I’d never heard of it until we wound our way down from the high mountains to meet it in its great, sprawling valley.

Montana State University is in Bozeman.

For years it was famous for growing peas for canning.

It is a railway town.

It is an important fish hatchery.

It has fabulous, interesting museums, including the Museum of the Rockies.

This museum has on display some of the most exciting paleontological finds in the world and it has the most brilliant way of showcasing them. It has the largest dinosaur collection in the world, many of them collected by noted Montana paleontologist Jack Horner.

The biggest Tyrannosaurus rex is displayed in the museum. This tyrant lizard is 40 ft from nose to tail and is 12 ft tall.

If he’s big, he’s a drop in the ocean compared to the biggest T rex skull. Oh, my.

The museum has lots of T rex skulls and has arranged them according to size and it makes the old jaw go slack walking along them. They all have names - which I have forgotten.

Bruce is absolutely at home in this context and is expert on the subject.

But he thrills at seeing the actual fossils.

It’s geek boy bliss.

Montana is famous for Hadrosaur, Tricerotops, and Tyrannosaurus discoveries - but perhaps most of all for the nests of eggs of the Hadrosaurs, or duck-billed dinosaurs. And there they are - eggs, eggs, eggs. Whole nests of them.

It might be full of fossils but it brings to life the behaviour of the dinosaurs.

Montana has done a lot of work on dinosaur ethology and have theories about their family life, the raising of the babies and the tending of them.

It is un-reptile like, this baby nurturing, except says Bruce, for crocodiles. And crocodiles and dinosaurs are closely related.

There is a lot of emphasis in the museum on

baby dinosaurs.

And on the growing up of dinosaurs and on what they ate. They ate many kinds of plants and the predatory ones ate every other animal and even each other.

And they had ailments. There was a particular jaw disorder which laid many of them low.

I have never thought of sickly dinosaurs, or of any vulnerability really.

My thrill is on seeing the burrowing dinosaurs. I had no idea that dinosaurs also lived underground. Of course, these were not big ones. If the museum recreations of them are accurate, they were actually very cute dinosaurs. They dug burrows to protect and care for their young, it seems.

This museum is superbly laid out so it is quite an adventure. It targets young minds in the way it mounts its displays but does not talk down to them. Its specimen commentary is uncompromisingly scientific.

However, it treads very carefully.

It has to deal with all those stubbornly ignorant creationists who think the world was made in seven days 6000 years ago and God put apparently much older fossils around the place to test our faith.

So, it has prominent and clear definitions of theory versus hypothesis writ large.

It is so sad that they have to do that.

It also is good that they do it with such diplomatic forcefulness.

Of course there are lots of other things on display, other fossils, although not any from the Ediacaran era - famous to Australians. American Indian culture and artefacts are well represented, along with western settlement in the region, and, utterly incongruously, it has the biggest, most sophisticated and most comprehensive exhibition on Pompeii probably in the world, It goes on for rooms and rooms with recreated rooms and friezes as well as masses of genuine antiquites from Pompeii.

It is the last thing we expected to see in Montana.

Um, and so was its ladies’ room. We are supposed to use it in twos?