Wyoming
Fossil Geeks Excited Over 52 Million-Year-Old Salamander Discovered Near Kemmerer
When Dean Sherman got the photos of a new specimen found in one of the famous fossil quarries near Kemmerer, Wyoming, he immediately dropped what he was doing and rushed to the site.
“I knew exactly what it was as soon as I got the picture,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s a salamander. That has to be a salamander.’”
Sherman, the owner of In Stone Fossils, has found thousands of incredible fossils from the Green River Formation. But the foot-long salamander he saw in that photo is a new milestone personally, professionally and paleontologically.
“In 20 years-plus of digging experience, I’ve never discovered anything even remotely like it,” he said. “It’s definitely a one-of-a-kind piece.”
Special Soft Salamander
While the Green River Formation is one of the most fossiliferous rock formations in the world, the National Park Service says amphibian fossils are “extremely uncommon.” Dave Dilworth, one of In Stone Fossils’ employees, found the fossil while excavating a new layer in an existing quarry that had already produced several incredible Green River discoveries.
Sherman identified the specimen as a Paleoamphiuma, an omnivorous salamander that lived around 52 million years ago. It’s only the third specimen of the prehistoric amphibian ever found.
“We know for a fact that we have the skull, at least two appendages in the front, and the back two appendages that to be laying over on top of each other on one side of the specimen,” he said. “The only thing missing is a little bit of the tail.”
What’s especially exciting is that there are telltale signs of soft-tissue preservation. Sherman could tell by the “halo” surrounding the specimen.
“The halo around the fossil is a visual sign that there’s skin around the specimen itself,” he said. “That would be the first Paleoamphiuma ever found with soft tissue preservation.”
No Place Like Home
The salamander’s scientific implications are exciting enough, but that’s not everything exciting about the fossil’s future. This important Cowboy State fossil is staying in Wyoming, now and forever.
Sherman explained that the quarry where the salamander was found is on a parcel of land In Stone Fossils is leasing from the state of Wyoming. That means the fossil belongs to, and will ultimately reside in, Wyoming.
“When a rare (fossil) is discovered in a state quarry, it will go into the repository of the state of Wyoming,” he said. “When it’s prepared, it could be displayed at the Wyoming State Museum or somewhere else, but it’s in public retention. The state of Wyoming will have ownership of it.”
Fossils from the Wyoming deposits of the Green River Formation are crown jewels in museums around the globe. A first-of-its-kind mouse bird found by In Stone Fossils in a private quarry in Kemmerer was recently donated to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
The newly discovered salamander may go out of state temporarily for research and display at other institutions, but it will never be gone forever. The Wyoming salamander will always come home.
Hours And Years Ahead
The salamander was fully excavated on the same day it was found. It’s in the possession of In Stone Fossils and will remain there for the foreseeable future.
Even though the rare fossil belongs to the people of Wyoming, they won’t be able to see it for a long time. There are hundreds of hours and many years between the fossil’s discovery and its public debut.
“It’s sitting in limbo right now,” he said. “It will be distributed to the state of Wyoming soon, but I’ve seen things put into a cabinet for a long period of time.”
The state will have to find money to prepare the fossil, a meticulous process where the rock must be removed without damaging the delicate bones. Sherman estimated that hundreds of hours of preparation would be needed to fully reveal the salamander.
“You’re looking at probably 200-plus hours of preparation on the specimen alone, and it (could) easily exceed that,” he said. “I don’t know what funding Wyoming has for a project like this.”
When the funding is available, a bidding process will open for the fossil’s preparation. That could be when the fossil takes a temporary trip out of state to be worked on by a professional preparator.
Sherman has won bids to prepare several fossils for the state of Wyoming, but he’ll probably pass on prepping the salamander. He’s still in the midst of a much larger project, preparing a massive and immaculately preserved crocodile.
“The crocodile is the priority for us,” he said. “With the projects in front of us, I don’t believe I would want to bid on this particular one.”
Sherman isn’t sure how long it’ll be before Wyomingites see their salamander’s full grandeur. Regardless, they’ll need to be patient.
“I’ve seen things put into a cabinet for years before the funding was available to do the preparation and put it on display,” he said. “It’s all funding.”
A Fossiliferous Future
The remarkable fossil salamander is the first fossil found in a previously untouched layer in the Kemmerer quarry. It’s an early indication that the layer has much more to offer than previously believed, and more 52 million-year-old secrets are emerging from the rock.
“We just discovered a bulb-like plant attached to a flower today,” he said. “We work with a paleobotanist at the Field Museum who will be out here in less than a month, and some of this information is very important to his studies. This kind of plant material from the Green River Formation hasn’t been highly studied.”
Better yet, all the fossils in the layer are within the state lease. Whatever Sherman and his team find, it’ll belong to Wyoming.
“The quarry’s been active for a while, but nobody’s dug this layer,” he said. “Many people didn’t know there was this vast amount of material in it, but we’re finding some pretty interesting things already.”
Even so, it’ll be hard to top the discovery of the third-of-its-kind soft-tissue salamander.
“We’re really proud to have it in public retention in Wyoming,” Sherman said. “It’ll be there for future scientists to study.”
Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.
If the Wyoming House and Senate approve its budget changes, then the chambers’ Joint Conference Committee will have helped the University of Wyoming dodge a $40 million cut, while also limiting the Wyoming Business Council to one year’s funding instead of the standard two.
The Joint Conference Committee adopted numerous changes to the state’s two-year budget draft, but didn’t formally advance the document to the House and Senate chambers. The committee meets again Monday and may do so at that time.
Then, the House and Senate can vote on whether to adopt that draft by a simple majority.
First, UW
Starting in January, the Joint Appropriations Committee majority had sought to deny around $20 million in exception requests the University of Wyoming made, while imposing a $40 million cut to the university’s block grant.
That’s about 10% of the state’s grant to UW but a lesser proportion of the school’s overall operating budget.
The Senate sought to restore the $60 million.
The House sought to keep the denials and cuts, ultimately settling on a bargain to cut $20 million, and hinge UW’s retention of the remaining $20 million on its finding and reporting $5 million in savings.
The Joint Conference Committee the House and Senate sent into a Friday meeting to negotiate those two stances chose to fund UW “fully,” Senate Majority Floor Leader Tara Nethercott, R-Cheyenne, told Cowboy State Daily in the state Capitol after the meeting.
But, $10 million of UW’s $40 million block grant won’t reach it until the school charts a “road map” of how it could save $5 million, and reports that to the Joint Appropriations Committee, she added.
“A healthy exercise, I think, for them to participate in, while the Legislature still allows them to receive full grant funding,” Nethercott said.
“I’m hopeful people feel confident the University is fully funded,” she continued, as it’s “on the brink of receiving a new president, having the resources he or she may need to continue to steer the leadership of the University, our state’s flagship school into the future.”
Hours earlier in a press conference, House Speaker Chip Neiman, R-Hulett, said the Legislature has been clear that UW should avoid “diversity, equity, and inclusion” or DEI programming, and that it’s the position of the House majority that the school should tailor its programming to Wyoming’s true business needs – so UW graduates will stay in the state.
Within an earlier draft of the budget sat a footnote blocking money for Wyoming Public Media — a publicly funded media and radio entity funded through UW’s budget.
That footnote is gone from the JCC’s draft, said Nethercott.
Wyoming Business Council
The Wyoming Business Council is set to receive roughly $14 million, confined to one year, for its internal operations, said Nethercott.
“Both chambers have decided to only fund the operations,” Nethercott said, “not all the grant programs.”
She said that’s to compel the Legislature to revisit the concerns it has with the agency, then return in the 2027 legislative session with a vision for its future.
The Business Ready Communities program is “eliminated,” she said.
JCC member Rep. Ken Pendergraft, R-Sheridan, elaborated further.
Of the appropriation, $12 million is from the state’s checking account, plus the state is authorizing WBC to use $157,787 in federal funds and nearly $1 million from other sources.
“We’re going to take it up as an interim topic in appropriations (committee) and how to rebuild it and make it work the way we think it should work,” said Pendergraft. But the JCC opted to fund the Small Business Development Center for two years, along with Economic Diversification Division for Manufacturing Works, and the Wyoming Women’s Business Center, Pendergraft noted, pointing to that language on his draft budget sheet.
Pendergraft made headlines last year by saying he wanted to eliminate the Wyoming Business Council altogether.
But Nethercott told the Senate earlier this month, legislators have complained of that agency her entire nine-year tenure.
She attributed this to what she called communications shortfalls that may not be intentional. She cosponsored a now-stalled bill this year that had sought to adopt a task force to evaluate WBC.
The Wyoming Business Council’s functions range from less controversial, like helping communities build infrastructure, to more controversial, like awarding tax-funded grants to certain businesses on a competitive application process.
Wyoming Public Television
Wyoming Public Television, which is not the same as Wyoming Public Media, is slated to receive the $3 million it lost when Congress defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Nethercott said.
It will also receive its usual $3 million from Wyoming.
The entity will not receive another $3 million it had sought to upgrade its emergency-alert towers, said Nethercott, “because we received information from them… they have another source to pay for the replacement and maintenance of the towers.”
Like the Wyoming Business Council, the Wyoming Public TV’s functions range from less controversial to more controversial.
The entity operates, maintains and staffs emergency alert towers throughout Wyoming.
Wyoming Public TV also produces entertainment and informational movies. Its state grants run through the community colleges’ budget.
State Employees
Nethercott noted that the JCC advanced to both chambers an agreement to pay $111 million from the state’s checking account to give state employees raises.
Those raises would bring them to 2024 market values for their work, she noted.
Because that money is coming from the state’s checking account, or “general fund,” and not its severance tax pool as the House had envisioned, then $111 million won’t impact the $105 million investment another still-viable bill seeking to build an “energy dominance fund” envisions.
That bill, sponsored by Senate President Bo Biteman, R-Ranchester, seeks to lend to large energy-sector projects.
Biteman told Cowboy State Daily in an interview days before the session convened that its purpose is to counteract “green” compacts investors have adopted, and which have bottlenecked energy projects.
Wyoming’s executive branch is currently suing BlackRock and other investors on that same assertion.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
It’s Week 11 in the 2026 Wyoming prep girls’ basketball season. That means it’s the end of the regular season. 3A and 4A schools have their final game or games to determine seeding before the regional tournament, or if a team is locked into a position, one last chance to fine-tune before the postseason. Games are spread across four days.
WYOPREPS WEEK 11 GIRLS BASKETBALL SCHEDULE 2026
Every game on the slate is a conference matchup. Several rivalry contests are part of this week’s schedule, such as East against Central, Cody at Powell, Lyman hosting Mountain View, and Rock Springs at Green River, just to name a few. Here is the Week 11 schedule of varsity games WyoPreps has. All schedules are subject to change. If you see a game missing, please email david@wyopreps.com.
CLASS 4A
Final Score: Laramie 68 Cheyenne South 27 (conference game)
CLASS 3A
Final Score: Lyman 40 Mountain View 26 (conference game)
CLASS 4A
Final Score: Evanston 41 Riverton 39 (conference game)
Final Score: Natrona County 42 Kelly Walsh 38 (conference game) – Peach Basket Classic
Final Score: #4 Thunder Basin 64 Campbell County 32 (conference game)
CLASS 3A
Final Score: #1 Cody 77 Worland 33 (conference game) – 5 different Fillies with a 3, and Hays led the way with 34 points.
Final Score: #2 Lander 49 Lyman 34 (conference game)
Final Score: #4 Wheatland 51 Douglas 40 (conference game)
Final Score: #5 Powell 48 Lovell 42 (conference game)
Final Score: Burns 56 Torrington 43 (conference game)
Final Score: Glenrock 78 Newcastle 30 (conference game)
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WyoPreps Girls Basketball Standings 2-23-26
WyoPreps Girls Basketball Week 10 Scores 2026
WyoPreps Coaches and Media Basketball Polls 2-18-26
WyoPreps Girls Basketball Week 9 Scores 2026
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WyoPreps Coaches and Media Basketball Polls 1-21-26
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WyoPreps Girls Basketball Week 1 Scores 2025-26
CLASS 4A
Rock Springs at #2 Green River, 5:30 p.m. (conference game)
#4 Thunder Basin at #5 Sheridan, 5:30 p.m. (conference game)
#1 Cheyenne East at #3 Cheyenne Central, 6 p.m. (conference game)
Jackson at Star Valley, 6 p.m. (conference game)
CLASS 3A
#3 Pinedale at Mountain View, 4 p.m. (conference game)
#1 Cody at #5 Powell, 5:30 p.m. (conference game)
Buffalo at Glenrock, 5:30 p.m. (conference game)
CLASS 3A
Newcastle at Buffalo, 12:30 p.m. (conference game)
Glenrock at Rawlins, 3 p.m. (conference game)
Torrington at #4 Wheatland, 5:30 p.m. (conference game)
Wyoming Boys 4A Swimming & Diving State Championships 2026
4A Boys State Swim Meet for 2026 in Cheyenne
Gallery Credit: David Settle, WyoPreps.com
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