Wyoming
Meet North America’s oldest dino: Found in Wyoming, named in Shoshone language – WyoFile
On a tract of public land near Dubois, an extrusion of very old rock — known as the lower Popo Agie Formation — peeks out of a hillside. To the unskilled eye, it just looks like a patch of pinkish-red rocks amid the grassy slopes.
But in 2013, a team of scientists who specialize in ancient history visited the site and found much more. The extrusion was rife with fossils, enough to keep the scientists busy for the dozen years that have since passed. Along with revisiting the site to look for more samples, the University of Wisconsin Geology Museum team has been doing painstaking work to date the rock and recreate the creatures’ bones that were fossilized there.
What they found is remarkable: North America’s oldest-known dinosaur. The discovery brought scientific advances that revise the understanding of reptile evolution on the planet. It also broke a long scientific naming tradition with a nod to Wyoming’s Indigenous people.
Meet Ahvaytum bahndooiveche. The dinosaur is slightly larger than a chicken, with a long tail, beaklike mouth and feathers. It lived a very, very long time ago: 230 million years in the past.
Along with being the oldest known dinosaur found in North America, it’s also the first dinosaur named in the Shoshone language — scientists teamed up with Eastern Shoshone tribal members on the project.
“So that’s kind of the back side of this story that, to me, is the most important,” said Dr. David Lovelace, a research scientist at the University of Wisconsin Geology Museum who co-led the work with graduate student Aaron Kufner. “And then just the icing on the cake is that the dinosaur itself is a big deal. Scientifically, we didn’t quite recognize how big it was until we got actual radioisotopic ages.”
Bones and stones
Lovelace grew up in Casper. He originally set out to become a nurse after high school, but Casper College geology professor Kent Sundell opened his world to paleontology, he said, and he never turned back. “I love bones and stones.”
Once he finished his doctorate, he became a research scientist at the University of Wisconsin Geology Museum. On his very first field season, he took students to the Wyoming site — “a tiny little pocket of exposure that was surrounded by much, much younger rock.” They discovered the Ahvaytum fossils on the ground surface during that first trip.
Such a notable discovery with so little effort is very lucky, Lovelace said.
But it’s not totally random. Lovelace was driven by a curiosity about the Popo Agie Formation, which he said is “one of the most understudied late Triassic rock units in the U.S.”
Because of factors like access, the Popo Agie is a difficult layer to study compared to other Triassic outcrops, like ones in the desert Southwest, he said. As a result, there is a lot of knowledge about the Southwest rocks and fossils, and not so much about the Wyoming ones.
“And so even knowing how the Wyoming Triassic correlated, how it is related to those rocks, was not studied at all,” he said. “So that’s been my passion, trying to solve that problem.”
The team found fossils of leg bones on the first prospecting trip, and knew very quickly that it was a dinosaur and Wyoming’s oldest, Lovelace said. But because “nobody knew the age of the Popo Agie,” they didn’t know how ancient it was.
“It literally had, like a 30-million-year potential range of what it could be,” he said. “Just off the bat, we had Wyoming’s oldest dinosaur. We knew that that could have been a thing and been pretty cool. But my study, or my interest, is to really dig deep and kind of flesh out the whole story.”
In order to pin down the dino’s age, he said, he and his team needed to precisely date the rocks. It took years of painstaking work to conduct the stratigraphy — the study of rock strata — and analyze the fossils of both Ahvaytum and other species they discovered. Ultimately, the team dated the dinosaur fossil at 230 million years.
The dino’s age is remarkable because it challenges the mainstream view on how reptiles emerged, with evidence that they were present in the Northern Hemisphere millions of years earlier than previously understood.
“When we saw that,” Lovelace said, “it kind of blew our minds.”
What’s in a name
When publishing about the new dinosaur, Lovelace’s team began going down the traditional path dictated by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, which stipulates the use of Latin and character style and often honors a notable scientist.
At the time, there was a lot of social reckoning taking place, Lovelace said, and his team started thinking about the ancestral land where the fossils were discovered. They reached out to their campus tribal liaison, who connected the team with the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes.
“That started a partnership that’s still ongoing,” Lovelace said.
The team worked with tribal elders and school groups, visiting the site together and exchanging knowledge. And in the end, the dinosaur was named in the language of the Eastern Shoshone, whose ancestral lands include the discovery site. Elders like Reba Teran were instrumental in helping identify the terms.
Ahvaytum bahndooiveche broadly translates to “long ago dinosaur” in the Shoshone language. Several tribal members are named as co-authors in the published work. That includes Teran and Amanda LeClair-Diaz, the Indian education coordinator at Fort Washakie School.
“The continuous relationship developed between Dr. Lovelace, his team, our school district and our community is one of the most important outcomes of the discovery and naming of Ahvaytum bahndooiveche,” LeClair-Diaz said in a news release.
“Typically, the research process in communities, especially Indigenous communities, has been one sided, with the researchers fully benefiting from studies,” LeClair-Diaz continued. “The work we have done with Dr. Lovelace breaks this cycle and creates an opportunity for reciprocity in the research process.”
The old way of naming was often divorced from the communities of people connected to the land or species, Lovelace said. “But our philosophy is that it needs to go a lot more beyond just kind of naming it after something. We really want to incorporate that community.”
Diminutive cousin
Though the dinosaur is small, Lovelace’s team believes Ahvaytum bahnooiveche is likely related to sauropods, a group of enormous herbivorous dinosaurs that included well-known titanosaurs.
His best guess is that the Ahvaytum lived in a landscape much like present-day coastal Texas, he said, with periods of both wetness and aridity. Although scientists haven’t found its skull material, based on other similar dinosaurs, it was likely omnivorous.
The discovery site has also been a source of fossils for a new species of amphibian, other dinosaur fossils and notable tracks. And, Lovelace said, “there’s still work to be done.”
It goes to show the depth of knowledge that can be gained with some curiosity — even in what appears to be an unremarkable patch of rocky soil in the middle of Wyoming.
“There’s so much history tied up in the rocks,” Lovelace said.
Wyoming State Historic Sites Superintendent Sharie Mooney Shada made an appearance on Sheridan Media’s Public Pulse to speak on the upcoming Immersion in Crow Culture program at Fort Phil Kearny on July 16.
The event begins at 6 p.m. Thursday, July 16 at the Fort Phil Kearny Interpretive Center.
S. Mooney Shada
The rangers host free, family-friendly evening talks and presentations throughout the summer. Shada said the Native American Student Interpretive Ranger Program has enriched the visitor experience at Fort Phil Kearny. In its fourth year at the fort, the program allows a perspective from the indigenous side of history.
Keep up with events at Fort Phil Kearny by clicking here.
Wyoming
‘Not just coloring tipis,’ experts debate quality of Indian education in Wyoming schools – WyoFile
RIVERTON—Nine years after the Wyoming Legislature passed the Indian Education for All Act, education experts say there is still more work to be done.
“I think it is a key priority across the state. Having grown up in Wyoming as a Native student in an off-reservation school, there was never a priority about learning about either tribe; and I still see that today,” Fremont County School District 21 Superintendent Deb Smith told the Wyoming Legislature’s Select Committee on Tribal Relations. “And I’m well into my 50s. So I think we need to push more.”
When the Legislature passed the Indian Education for All Act in 2017, lawmakers did not create an office of Indian education similar to the ones already in place in states such as Montana. Now, some experts and tribal members say they hope Wyoming will move in that direction in the future. But regardless of the particulars of future steps, reservation school leaders told lawmakers that the Indian Education for All Act needs more support and better integration into Wyoming schools.
“As a Native person, we shouldn’t always have to be the one advocating on behalf of our tribes,” Smith said. “People that are Wyomingites should know. They should be sharing that great history.”
Fremont County School District 14 Superintendent Blakke Bertram agreed.
“When there are questions on our state assessment that are geared towards Indian Ed. for All, then I’ll know that we’ve taken it serious,” Bertram told the tribal relations committee during its June meeting in Riverton. “I feel like I have yet to see that.”
The Legislature, he pointed out, recently passed new requirements for literacy education — and backed it up with grant funds and rulemaking. “So when we say something’s important, when we put support and money behind it, we’re saying it’s important. Have we really done that for Indian Ed. for All?”
Revisions underway
When she takes Lander fourth graders on their annual tour of the Wind River Reservation, Fremont County School District Native American Liaison Lisa McCart said one of the highlights is often the visit to Sacajawea’s grave. Having read “Naya Nuki,” the kids usually know who Sacajawea is — but seeing her grave, and hearing Fort Washakie Schools Librarian Robin Levin explain the history of disputes over her burial place, is special.
Fremont County School District 1 is not among the schools regularly invited to testify at tribal relations meetings. However, district representatives sat down with the Lander Journal in the days following the meeting.
As the Lander schools’ Native American liaison, McCart explained, her job involves keeping track of all of the district’s Native students and working with the district’s curriculum coordinator to coordinate learning and cultural experiences. McCart invites in tribal experts, organizes field trips, and works with extracurricular clubs in addition to helping Native students get to, stay in and feel supported at school.
Not every Wyoming school district has a significant population of Native American students, or a Native American liaison. Schools like those in Lander, which are close to the Wind River Reservation, have a bit of an advantage when it comes to integrating Indian education into their classrooms, the Lander district’s Curriculum Coordinator Deidre Meyer explained.
Scotty Ratliff, a member of the Wyoming Department of Education’s relatively new Native American Education Cabinet and a former legislator, said the Wyoming Department of Education could do more to provide districts with resources, teaching materials and curriculum to support the implementation of Indian Education for All statewide. Not every school in Wyoming, he pointed out, is close enough to the Wind River Reservation to have easy access to tribal experts.
The Indian Education for All Act requires that the state take another look at its social studies standards related to the act every nine years. Last updated in 2018, the state is currently in the process of putting together those new standards, the department’s Native American Liaison Rob Black told legislators.
Meyer worked in the Montana Office of Indian Education for years before moving to Lander and was at one point the principal of Fort Washakie Elementary School. She is among several Fremont County educators represented on the committee revising those standards.
Beyond her role as her district’s Native American liaison, McCart is also a member of the Wyoming Department of Education’s Native American Cabinet. In particular, she’s involved in an Essential Understandings subgroup that will be reviewing the updates to social studies standards currently underway to ensure they adequately incorporate tribal perspectives and Native American culture and history.
Learning language
Accessing Shoshone and Arapaho language classes also can be difficult for students, especially for those seeking successive years of Shoshone or Arapaho to qualify for the highest tier of Wyoming’s Hathaway Scholarship, Native American Education Director Roy Brown said. Brown works for Fremont County School District 25, which oversees Riverton schools. Part of the problem is a lack of qualified teachers, Brown and Fremont County School District 38 Superintendent David Holbert noted. Riverton has only ever offered one year of Arapaho language, Brown explained, which means that the district’s students wanting to take Arapaho can’t meet the high-tier Hathaway requirement of two successive years of a foreign language unless they actually take three years of foreign languages.
There are very few available and certified teachers of the Arapaho language, the group of superintendents explained — and even fewer for Shoshone.
McCart recalled that several years ago, Lander pursued its own attempts to bring Northern Arapaho and Shoshone language classes into the district. But, she said, her district found that there are very few people with the appropriate certifications to teach either language as part of a public school class. One of the ideas that she and Meyer have discussed is bringing in tribal elders or others who are fluent in Arapaho and Shoshone outside of a formal class setting, where they might not need to meet the same certification requirements as a teacher but can still help interested students start to learn.
‘[Not just] coloring tipis’
Bertram also challenged the implementation of the current standards for Indian Education for All, even in schools close to the reservation.
“My kids, they go to a neighboring school district, an off-reservation school district. I’ve seen the work that’s going toward Indian Ed. for All in that school district,” Bertram said. “It is not teaching my daughter, my son, about what Indian Ed. for All stands for and what it means to be a Northern Arapaho or Eastern Shoshone tribal member on our reservation.”
He continued: “We’re talking coloring tipis. That’s the kind of stuff we’re seeing on our off-reservation schools when it comes to Indian Ed. for All. And that’s a border school.”
If the district in question had called, Bertram’s district would likely be willing to work with them to share resources, he said.
“I appreciate his passion,” Lisa McCart said of Bertram’s remarks. However, she added, the superintendents at Fremont County school districts meet monthly, and she isn’t aware of any concerns along those lines having been raised at any of those meetings.
McCart and Meyer explained some of the ways Lander schools work to incorporate Indian Education for All into Lander’s curriculum, including reservation tours, cultural events, and the incorporation of Native American literature, history, and legal texts into classes from kindergarten through 12th grade.
For example, a few years ago McCart worked to bring musician and artist Gabriel Ayala, a member of the Yaqui tribe of Arizona, to Lander schools. Ayala worked with a variety of grade levels, McCart said, including teaching kids at Gannett Peak Elementary about the meanings of different symbols in Yaqui culture through an activity that involved the elementary students selecting symbols that would be meaningful to their family and drawing them on a tipi.
“If we weren’t confident in what we’re doing and trying to do in this district, we wouldn’t be vocal at the state level,” Meyer pointed out. “It’s not just coloring tipis.”
To characterize the district’s approach as such, McCart added, “is disrespectful for the [Native] families that choose to be in this district.”
McCart and Meyer noted that communication is key, and they hope Fremont County and Wyoming school districts can work together to ensure all Wyoming students receive an adequate education concerning tribal peoples and issues. If someone has concerns, they said, they both hope they will bring them to them directly so Lander can work to address those concerns.
Wyoming
At 6,000-year-old crossing, Gov. Gordon OKs Wyoming’s first-ever designated pronghorn migration route
Some Green River Basin pronghorn migrate more than 200 miles. Now, Wyoming has designated the landscapes they move through in an effort to protect the route.
by Mike Koshmrl, WyoFile
SUBLETTE COUNTY — Gov. Mark Gordon heralded Wyoming’s first-ever designation to protect a pronghorn migration corridor — a more than 2 million-acre web of habitat — at Trapper’s Point, which he called a “wonderful passageway.”
“How incredibly valuable it is that you are standing here today,” Gordon told the crowd, “to witness this remarkable moment.”
Gordon commemorated the moment with his feet planted on the narrow bulge of high country that splits the Green and New Fork rivers. Thousands of years ago, the site was a well-used hunting ground for Native Americans — it’s the earliest known killing and processing site for pronghorn in North America. Now it boasts a wildlife overpass.
No pronghorn were to be seen during the especially windy Friday afternoon gathering, which attracted 75 attendees from nearby Pinedale and other western Wyoming communities.
Now Trapper’s Point is officially classified as a “bottleneck” for the Sublette Pronghorn Herd — one of 13 such bottlenecks. That classification is supposed to prevent any surface-disturbing activity, with the intent that pronghorn can keep passing through Trapper’s Point for generations to come.
Protecting the ability of the fleet-footed, tawny-and-white ungulates to migrate is a “key factor” in sustaining their population, Wyoming Game and Fish Director Angi Bruce said.
“This becomes even more important in severe winters or extreme droughts,” Bruce said. “Pronghorn are long overdue for recognition.”
Pronghorn in Sublette, Teton, Sweetwater and Lincoln counties travel a long road — some migrate more than 200 miles to escape harsh winters, trekking south into the lower Green River Basin, a semi-arid sweep of sagebrush steppe between Pinedale and Rock Springs. Then in the spring, they retrace those paths, returning to summer ranges, lush with verdant vegetation, even going as far as Grand Teton National Park.
There was also a long road of bureaucracy to get to this point.
Nearly three decades of effort preceded the formal designation of the migration routes used by the Sublette Pronghorn Herd, which is the farthest-traveling and among the largest pronghorn herds in the West.
Jackson Hole biologists long knew that the valley’s pronghorn left in the winter. But details were hazy on where they went and how they got there until around the turn of the century. Using data from tracking collars, biologists like Joel Berger, Steve Cain, Hall Sawyer and Doug Brimeyer helped delineate the route.
Wyoming ecologist Hall Sawyer fits a tracking collar onto a migratory pronghorn near the Tetons in 1998. Twenty-seven years later, state wildlife managers are pressing to designate the pronghorn herd’s migration path. Photo: Mark Gocke // Wyoming Game and Fish Department
In 2008, a Bridger-Teton National Forest plan amendment established a portion of the path as the nation’s first designated wildlife migration corridor.
Popularized by its branding as the “Path of the Pronghorn,” the route has received press in national publications like High Country News and the New York Times.
But the southern reaches of the migration through the energy-rich Green River Basin have faced major political opposition since the early 2000s. Wyoming first attempted to protect those travel corridors in 2019, under a policy administered by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. That effort was halted after a coalition of industry trade groups and counties protested.
Then, in early 2020, Gordon revamped the migration policy with an executive order. Still, the Sublette Pronghorn Herd proposal gathered dust, even as development threatened the route.
Game and Fish revived efforts to protect the migration in late 2023 and early 2024. Biologists pulled together one of North America’s most comprehensive migration datasets, benefiting from approximately two decades of GPS collar information collected from more than 400 pronghorn.
Some controversy followed the process until near the end. There was a debate about whether to designate the migration’s two easternmost segments, in the Red Desert and east of Farson. The Game and Fish Department proposed excluding the routes, but was overridden by its commission. Then Gordon upended that decision, excluding the two segments.
Vetting the migration corridor through a Gordon-appointed working group was the second-to-last step in the designation process.
“Today’s designation demonstrates that voluntary, locally driven conservation works,” said Robb Slaughter, who chaired the group, during the commemoration at Trapper’s Point.
Time will tell if that’s the case. Wyoming’s migration policy is, by design, permissive of development. Private land is exempt from protections, and designation is not an assurance that new stressors won’t be added to the landscape.
“Today is not the end of the process,” Slaughter said. “It’s the beginning of the next chapter. Continued monitoring, adaptive management, research, and cooperation will ensure these recommendations remain effective as conditions change.”
But Friday was the end of the migration designation process. The governor’s informal OK — no signature was needed — was the last step, said Sara DiRienzo, the governor’s deputy policy advisor.
Wildlife advocates celebrated the moment.
“This is historical,” Bruce said. It’s the first effort to protect the full length of a pronghorn migration corridor in the nation, she said.
WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.
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