Made it Yellowstone. 4th national park. It’s nice today but might be snowing the next few days. But did already see some elk and pronghorn sheep, even if they were just around the visitor center.
oOh also in Wyoming. 5th state.
Day: September 27, 2019
The Museum of the Rockies (MOR) houses the largest collection of dinosaur fossils in the country. A lot of dinosaur remnants were/are found in the state of Montana. The size of these animals in immense. Ready to show the girls the original Jurassic Park tonight 🙂
The have a T-Rex that still has its lower rib bones, one of the only ones that kept them during fossilization.
They also have the first and only evidence of a female t-Rex. When they sliced the femur bone there was still some soft tissue inside. They analyzed it and it was identical to that of a bird during ovulation. Thus, they house the first and only B-Rex named “Catherine”.
In the back of the skull of the Triceratops is a “ball joint” for a better lack of description. It is still the most spherical shape found in nature up to this date. The ability it gave this animal to move and rotate its head is unbelievable. Pics below.
Then we quickly walked through the Genghis Khan exhibit who ruled from 1206-1227. The Magyars supposedly came over from Mongolia and were also known to be great horseman. Genghis Khan ushered in many new aspects into culture that are still carried on today. Such as, religious freedom / one nation under many Gods, national parks/preserves, ground beef, forks (which were until then considered to be effeminate), coal, and a-meritocracy. Even now they say 1 in 16 males share the same Y chromosome as Genghis Khan.
Who thinks the start of the Missouri River starts in Missouri? Well it doesn’t. It starts in Montana, in what was known as old “Gallatin City I & II” of the mid 1800s.
“The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri River and such principal stream of it, as, by it’s course & communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean…may offer the most direct & practible water communication across this continent…” from Thomas Jefferson’s instructions to Meriwether Lewis, July 4, 1803.
Here 3 Rivers flow into what is the beginning of the Might Missouri River. The Gallatin river was named and Lewis and Clark named the other 2 the Jefferson River and the Madison River. The Madison River flows into the Jefferson River and then the Gallatin River runs into that as it forms the beginning of the Missouri River.
This was also the site of Colter’s Run. I’ll just put a picture of the story so I don’t have to copy it 🙂
middle: 70 million years ago the continental divide was formed and the missouri flowed into Hudson Bay
right: 2 million years ago the ice age firced the river to flow south
Right past the Fairmont Hot Springs is the town of Butte. There is always something to see anywhere. The highlight of Butte was a the “Our Lady of the Rockies” statue, which happens to be the 4th largest statue in the United States. The Statue of Liberty is only the 2nd tallest. The tallest is in Puerto Rico, the “Birth of the New World” (a Christopher Columbus and his ship). The 3rd largest is in Florida of a “Pegasus and Dragon”. Yes Chloe, we will go see and take pictures for you :). And this Lady of the Rockies is the 4th. We did not take the tour to go up, but Edwin did take a picture through binoculars just so we could show it off.
The other highlight that Butte has to offer is the one of the first and largest Superfund sites in America, the Berkeley Pit. It is 1 mile long by 1/2 mile wide and 1,780’ deep. It was a large copper and silver mine in the mid 1800s. It was closed on Earth Day in 1982 and the pit is filling with water but it is heavily laden with metals. They are working hard to divert the water before the it reaches the water table (which is supposed to happen in 2020) because then it will contaminate all the drinking water in Butte and the surrounding area, the Clark-Fork River. Pretty awful. We were there before 9 when you could go to the viewing platform so of course we just went up the hill to look over. Edwin could see the “lake” but I couldn’t so I climbed the fence until Edwin yelled at me to get do-win because he could hear the alarm sounding in the distance from me climbing up there. There’s a pic below of Edwin helping me down so I didn’t get hurt from the fence up top. Edwin was not so happy. Vera ran back to the RV scared the police were going to come. I just wanted a look…. 👀 🙂
