Central:

Casper: Sunny today with a high near 90 and mostly clear overnight with widespread haze between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. and a low near 62.

Riverton:  Sunny today with a high near 94 and partly cloudy overnight with a low near 60.

Shoshoni: Sunny today with a high near 93 and partly cloudy overnight with a low near 62.

Southwest:

Evanston: Slight chance of rain after 3 p.m., otherwise sunny today with a high near 88 and mostly clear overnight with a low near 54.

Green River: Sunny today with a high near 89 and mostly clear overnight with a low near 61.

Lyman: Sunny today with a high near 89 and partly cloudy overnight with a low near 57.

Western Wyoming:

Pinedale: Sunny today with a high near 83 and partly cloudy overnight with a low near 52.

Alpine: Widespread haze before 10 a.m., otherwise sunny today with a high near 89. Partly cloudy overnight with a slight chance of rain before 7 p.m. and a low near 55.

Big Piney: Sunny today with a high near 84 and partly cloudy overnight with a low near 50.

Northwest:

Dubois: Widespread haze before 1 p.m., otherwise sunny today with a high near 85 and partly cloudy overnight with a slight chance of rain between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m., widespread haze before 7 p.m. and a low near 54.

Jackson: Sunny today with a high near 87 and partly cloudy overnight with a low near 52 and wind gusts as high as 21 mph.

Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park: Widespread haze before 3 p.m., otherwise sunny today with a high near 79 and partly cloudy overnight with a low near 48.

Bighorn Basin:

Thermopolis: Widespread haze after 3 p.m., otherwise sunny today with a high near 92 and partly cloudy overnight with a low near 65.

Cody:  Widespread haze after 3 p.m., otherwise sunny today with a high near 86 and partly cloudy overnight with a low near 63.

Powell: Sunny today with a high near 89 and partly cloudy overnight with a low near 61.

North Central:

Buffalo: Widespread haze between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m., otherwise sunny today with a high near 84 and wind gusts as high as 20 mph. Partly cloudy overnight with a low near 67.

Sheridan: Sunny and hot today with a high near 91 and partly cloudy overnight with a slight chance of rain after midnight and a low near 58.

Dayton:  Sunny today with a high near 87 and partly cloudy overnight with a slight chance of rain after midnight and a low near 59.

Northeast:

Gillette: Sunny today with a high near 86 and wind gusts as high as 24 mph. Partly cloudy overnight with a low near 58 and wind gusts as high as 25 mph.

Newcastle: Sunny today with a high near 88 and wind gusts as high as 23 mph. Mostly clear overnight with a low near 58 and wind gusts as high as 18 mph.

Hulett: Sunny today with a high near 86 and wind gusts as high as 20 mph. Partly cloudy overnight with a low near 56 and wind gusts as high as 18 mph.

Eastern Plains:

Torrington: Sunny and hot today with a high near 94 and mostly clear overnight with a low near 58.

Lusk: Sunny and breezy today with a high near 88 and wind from 10-20 mph. Mostly clear overnight with a low near 55.

Midwest: Widespread haze after noon, otherwise sunny today with a high near 89 and mostly clear overnight with a low near 60.

Southeast:

Cheyenne: Slight chance of rain after noon, otherwise mostly sunny and hot today with a high near 90. Partly cloudy overnight with a low near 58.

Laramie: Slight chance of rain after noon, otherwise sunny today with a high near 87. Partly cloudy overnight with a slight chance of rain before midnight and a low near 57.

Pine Bluffs: Sunny, breezy and hot today with a high near 92 and wind from 10-20 mph. Partly cloudy overnight with a low near 57.

South Central:

Rawlins: Sunny and hot today with a high near 91 and mostly clear overnight with a low near 57.

Encampment: Sunny today with a high near 86 and mostly clear overnight with a low near 57.

Wamsutter: Sunny today with a high near 86 and mostly clear overnight with a low near 56.

Around 38 million years ago, three small snakes slithered into a burrow seeking shelter from an apocalypse blanketing their world in volcanic ash. They never escaped, becoming entombed in the spot where they sought sanctuary in what would far into their future become Wyoming.

The misfortune of the small snakes has become a boon for paleontologists. New research published by a team from the University of Alberta has gained critical insight into the elusive history of prehistoric snakes.

“We’ve never had a good fossil record of these snakes,” said Michael Caldwell, a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. “Here, we’ve got three really lovely specimens in one burrow, which gives us the information we need to investigate the origins and evolutionary history of an enigmatic group of living, burrowing snakes.”

White River Wyoming

The White River Formation is a layer of rock deposited during the Paleogene Period. Caldwell described it as a time of weird mammals and widespread volcanic activity in North America.

“The rocks of the White River Formation are 38 million years old, give or take a week or two,” he said. “It’s white because the sediments are heavily dominated by volcanic ash mixed with sand and fine-grained silt. Volcanic ash events were continual and caused several disasters.”

The fossils from the White River Formation are legendary. Large and small mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles are immaculately preserved in the ash-dominated rock.

“We find early dogs and cats, and saber-toothed relatives of cats that aren’t the same saber-tooths of the mammoth and mastodon,” Caldwell said. “Early bunny rabbits, all kinds of lizards, turtles, big-bodied mammals, early chameleons. The White River stuff is just amazing.”

There are legendary exposures of the White River Formation in Wyoming, particularly around Douglas. That’s where the University of Wyoming was excavating in 1976, when researchers found the three small snakes that are leaving a big impact.

Breithaupt’s Hibernating Snake

The fossilized snakes were collected with several other White River fossils during UW’s 1976 field project in Douglas. Aside from a 1997 paper written by paleontologist Brent Breithaupt, the UW Geological Museum’s collection manager at the time, the snakes haven’t garnered much attention until recently.

“I was talking with Brent, and he offered me the opportunity to work on the material in the early 2000s,” Caldwell said. “It took me a while to find a grad student to put on the project, and then it took us a while to get the paper written once she had graduated.”

That grad student, Jasmine Croghan, is the lead author of the paper describing the Wyoming White River snakes. The new species was called Hibernophis breithaupti, honoring Breithaupt and his original hypotheses about the unique discovery.

“Brent’s paper interpreted them as a hibernating assemblage of snakes,” Caldwell said. “That’s why we named them Hibernophis, the hibernating snake.”

A Den Of Beautiful Snakes

When describing a new species of prehistoric animal, the Holy Grail for paleontologists is a complete specimen.

Croghan, Caldwell and the other scientists studying the White River snakes had four of them, all nearly perfect skeletons to study, all collected near Douglas.

Snakes from the White River Formation aren’t well-known in the fossil record. Paleontologists have acquired most of their knowledge on their biology and evolutionary history from isolated fragments or individual bones.

“There are millions of isolated snake vertebrae in museum collections around the world, but very few articulated snakes,” he said. “As terrifying and robust as a snake might appear, they’re not held together very tightly. When they die, their bits and pieces wash about and they become disarticulated very easily.”

Caldwell said the three snakes found in the burrow, and a fourth specimen found nearby, are the most complete specimens of their kind ever found in the White River Formation.

“This particular trio of snakes are beautifully preserved,” he said. “We have almost everything in the anatomy of these little snakes, from the tips of their noses to the tips of their tails. They’re only missing the very tip of the tail, but everything else is there.”

Caldwell explained that “without going into the gory details about snake bony anatomy,” that Hibernophis is a kind of rubber boa, a smaller member of the boid family of snakes, which includes anacondas and boa constrictors.

While boids were and are widespread throughout the Americas, their evolutionary history remained an enigma until the discovery of Hibernophis. Wyoming’s White River snakes have provided critical insight into their evolutionary story.

Boid Behavior

While the anatomy and evolutionary significance of Hibernophis is exciting, the discovery revealed equally exciting information on the behavior of the 38-million-year-old snake. Caldwell said the preservation of three snakes in one burrow is significant.

“We have something that we never find in the fossil record,” he said. “Here we have three of these little rubber boas all curled up together in this ancient mammal burrow. One of them is substantially larger than the other two, so you can put on your natural history hat and start imagining what this could be.”

Whatever it was that drove the snakes into the burrow, which had been dug by a burrowing mammal, the snakes didn’t mind sharing the same space.

“We don’t know why they were there, but they were comfortable being together wherever they were,” he said. “Which means there is social behavior of snakes preserved in the fossil record.”

There’s a modern precedent for this behavior in snakes. Thousands of garter snakes in cold climates have been found living together in holes, entering a prolonged stupor while surviving from their collective body heat in what’s called a hibernaculum.

The three Hibernophis specimens may have perished in their hibernaculum, but more research would be needed to prove this. Regardless, Caldwell said the discovery is a rare and exciting instance of prehistoric behavior preserved in the fossil record.

“Most people think of reptiles as dim-witted, cold-blooded, not very social and with no maternal care,” he said. “The usual non-mammal analogies. Could this be a parent and a couple of young ones? Or is it possible that we’ve got a fright response and they’ve all ended up in a burrow together in the midst of a volcanic ash event? Or were they preparing for a cold weather season? We don’t know.”

Rediscovering Discoveries

The four specimens of Hibernophis breithaupti are in the collections of the UW Geological Museum. Caldwell and the other scientists briefly took the fossils to the University of Alberta for research and then to Austin, Texas, for a micro-CT scan.

“That’s how we found the third specimen,” he said. “It was inside the block and wasn’t clearly visible on the surface since it’s slightly below the other two.”

A major scientific discovery usually raises more questions than it answers. Thanks to the discovery of Hibernophis, Caldwell anticipates a flurry of scientific inquiries will be pursued.

“Every good answer just rattles a whole series of questions even harder,” he said. “Are there more specimens of Hibernophis? What would that have to say about the hypotheses that we’ve put forward in this recent publication? How does new material and new information change what we think we know about the interrelationships of these animals with all other birds and snakes, both fossil and living?

“You end up with more questions to ask from every answer that you put forward.”

For Caldwell, another major takeaway from the study of Hibernophis was its “rediscovery” in the collections of the UW Geological Museum. He believes more future paleontological discoveries will come from already-excavated fossils sitting on the dusty shelves of museums.

“There are hundreds, if not thousands, of specimens hiding away in museum collections that have never been examined,” he said. “The next places to go are out into the field and down into museum collections. Several places have good White River Formation collections. We need to see if there’s anything in those collections that’s been missed.”

Yesterday And Today

While these Hibernophis died in an ash-filled burrow 38 million years ago, their boid descendants survived into the present day. Rubber boas are everywhere in Wyoming, although they can be hard to find.

“These boas alive today are part of that same radiation as are these fossil ones,” he said. “They’re small-bodied night feeders that are rather secretive and spend a lot of time hiding in the sand, so very few people see them. They’re common in the pet trade if you’re into a rubber boa that stays buried in the sand in your terrarium all day, which I’m not.”

The anatomy and behavior of Wyoming’s modern-day boids might shed more insight into the world of their prehistoric ancestors preserved in the White River Formation. Hibernophis has established itself as another jewel in the ornate crown of Wyoming paleontological discoveries.

“With Hibernophis, we fill in a science gap and get some insights on prehistoric snake behavior,” Caldwell said. “It’s a great story and three really lovely specimens.”

Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.

YUMA, Ariz. — If there’s one lesson that was pounded into the heads of three Wyoming legislators and a state Senate candidate during their trip to the southern border Thursday and Friday, it’s that the situation here has become untenable and seismic for Americans living on the border and the rest of the United States.

All of the legislators said they plan to support legislation that would give money specifically for law enforcement efforts at the border in Arizona. During the last legislative session, $750,000 was earmarked to help Texas with its immigration efforts.

Although this kind of money is a drop in the pond compared to the $19.9 billion U.S. Customs and Border Protection budget, Yuma County Supervisor Jonathan Lines said sometimes just raising awareness about the growing immigration crisis is important.

“I want to make sure I’m doing everything I can making sure the story is being told,” Lines said. “The federal government is not doing its job, the cartels are in control.”

With immigration one of the biggest issues of the 2024 campaign season, more state-level officials like the Wyoming contingent are visiting border towns to see the crisis for themselves.

At the border near Yuma a little after 1:30 a.m. Friday, they witnessed Border Patrol agents detain a group of illegal immigrants who had walked into the United States through a gap in the border wall.

The phrase “every state is a border state” can be hard to conceptualize for people who live far away from the southern border and don’t see what the people of Yuma, Arizona, deal with every day.

Senate District 6 candidate Kim Withers said this is exactly why she made the trip. When going door-to-door for her campaign this summer, she said the issue of illegal immigration came up with surprising frequency with Wyoming voters.

“Of course, the drugs and criminal activity is going to eventually be seeping up to Wyoming,” she said. “I think it’s a real issue I can get behind.”

Withers said she also wants to make sure local law enforcement is fully funded for the increasing pressures they will likely face. She mentioned how the small town of Guernsey, Wyoming, recently lost one of its two police officers because of lack of funding.

“Getting back to the root causes,” said state Rep. Jon Conrad, R-Mountain View. “Showing our support would be demonstrable. This isn’t a Yuma issue, this impacts all of us.”

Escalating Crisis

The southern border has been a problem area for decades, including under former President Donald Trump’s watch, but illegal crossing increased significantly after President Joe Biden took office. After Biden took office, he halted work on Trump’s border wall and has faced increasing political pressure as the immigration crisis continues to grow.

During Biden’s administration so far, there have been more than 8 million encounters with migrants, as well as 1.7 million “getaways,” or illegal immigrants who slip past the Border Patrol and are living in the U.S. without any contact with immigration officials, according to a report from the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.

Noted in the report is a statement from Tom Homan, former director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who said Biden is the only president ever to “unsecure the border on purpose” and that his “open border polices have created the greatest national security crisis since 9/11.”

Sometimes the impacts of these crossings come in ways that the rest of the world may not consider, Lines said.

“The woman and children are really why I do this,” Lines said.

In addition to the rampant funneling of fentanyl through the border and into America’s communities that’s caused an increase in overdose deaths, there’s also the trafficking of people — specifically children — that’s nearly just as prevalent.

The Mexican crime and drug cartels are becoming more active, bold and dangerous.

‘Total Disregard For People’s Lives’

Lines said he was told by Arizona Republican congressman Andy Biggs that there are around 85,000 missing children in the Office of Refugee Resettlement database.

While touring the Wyoming delegation around the border wall built under the direction of Trump, Lines showed them where the rape of a 10-year-old boy had happened.

“These people are absolute animals, they have total disregard for people’s lives,” he said.

Although many people point to the genuine desire many immigrants have to start new and productive lives in America, he believes that not a single person crosses the border these days without the blessing of the cartels, thereby making themselves indentured servants.

“They have no idea what people are actually doing and submitting themselves to to get here,” he said.

Besides horrible acts like these, Lines said the cartels have also assisted with letting state-sponsored terrorists into the United States from places like Iran.

“Are we going to face another 9/11 because of this?” he questioned.

A former sheriff’s deputy, Rep. Tony Niemec, R-Green River, said he worries about what some of his former co-workers will face in the near future.

Also scattered around the base of the wall were various articles of clothing. Lines explained that these were from people who had discarded them after swimming across the Colorado River to get to America.

At one juncture, the borders of Arizona, California and Mexico convene at the Colorado River. Lines said this convergence point leads to many issues as California authorities have a policy to not assist Border Patrol agents with apprehending people who illegally cross the border.

How It Works

When people are detained at the border, they are documented, but almost always are sent on into the United States as long as they claim asylum from their home country, Lines said. These asylum hearings can take years to take place, to which only about 5% immigrants show up for, he said.

Still, Lines said most of these people are coming to the U.S. with relatively positive intentions and have no problem being detained as they are actively also seeking food and medical assistance.

Withers said she has no issues with immigrants who pursue the legal routes to achieving citizenship.

“If they come in the right way and want to do good work, that’s a good way to do it,” she said. “I’m concerned people are not doing it the right way.”

Facilitating this medical assistance has led to difficult decisions for local health care workers, Lines said, as they have often had to prioritize serving immigrants who recently crossed the border over permanent residents. Despite the community receiving around 200,000 snowbird vacationers per year, he said 85% of the patients at the hospital make an income below the poverty line.

Those who do get through undocumented are doing so strategically and specifically so their presence won’t be known by authorities, Lines said.

“The Border Patrol’s biggest concern is people who don’t want to be detained,” he said. “The people who want to go don’t necessarily want to do that. They want to do us harm.”

Oppositional Forces

Lines sees the Mexican cartels as the root source of most of the border problems.

Combating their efforts is a little like playing whack-a-mole, he said. When a change is made, their only goal is to work around it.

“They’ll just deploy resources somewhere else,” he said.

He also feels frustration with the Biden administration, which he believes doesn’t have a legitimate interest in improving border security.

He said there are countless examples large and small that prove his point. One of the small signs, he said, were cameras installed under Trump at the border that were never turned on by the Biden administration.

Niemec saw the difference in policies between the two administrations showing up in the form of completely different infrastructure and management choices as one of the most eye-opening parts of the trip.

“They call this portion the Trump wall, and it was such an improvement on some of the other legacy portions of this wall,” he said. “Then on this portion, there’s no wall. It looks real secure until you get to the end of it.”

When former Arizona Gov. Greg Ducey started stacking up shipping containers at the border in 2022 in response to Biden’s refusal to continue building Trump’s wall, Lines believes it reduced illegal crossings.

When Biden came to a compromise over restarting construction on the wall due to immigrants drowning in the Colorado River and local tractors being stolen near an opening in the wall, Biden built his own section of metal wall.

Lines said this still wasn’t sufficient to prevent people from trying to get across. There were other locations where Biden installed chicken-wire fences.

Many people argue that walls don’t work as an effective deterrent for people illegally crossing into America. A 2022 study from the conservative-leaning Cato Institute found that Trump’s wall did not reduce crossings after major portions of it were built.

The former chairman of the Arizona Republican Party, Lines helped start the Border Security Alliance (BSA) to help pass policy around the nation that he believes will secure the border, but he believes revamping America’s overall immigration system is the ultimate solution. BSA plans to ramp up their efforts for the upcoming election season.

“This is my home, this is my country here,” Lines said of his motivations.

The state legislators and Withers shot ads for their respective reelection campaigns with BSA while at the wall.

Agricultural Shut Downs

Lines also explained how bacterial contamination to local farm fields such as E. coli can lead to drastic consequences for their local economy and the country as the Yuma area produces 93% of the nation’s leafy green vegetables. Some of these lettuce fields come right up to the border wall.

To prevent risks like these, Yuma County has paid to install porta potties around the outside of the border in expectation of the many people who illegally cross.

“It prevents people from walking in the fields,” Lines explained.

Leo Wolfson can be reached at leo@cowboystatedaily.com.