Despite estimates of billions in investment losses, Freedom Caucus lawmakers again advanced a bill Tuesday that would punish contracted financiers who invest Wyoming’s money in funds with environmental, social and governance goals. 

The faction, newly in control of the House, is dead set against seeing public investments put into such funds, which it sees as antithetical to Wyoming’s fossil fuel industries. 

Blocking investments based on such goals has broad support in the Capitol, and is already reflected in state policies, according to state agency testimony in recent days. But the state’s money managers say a piece of the bill that brings steep financial penalties against financiers who violate the rules against ESG investing would make Wyoming’s combined $40 billion in investments toxic to major firms and thus slow returns.

On the House floor Tuesday, Rep. Bob Nicholas, the former head of the House Appropriations Committee and a veteran of a separate committee that oversees the state’s investments, said Wyoming’s financiers estimate losses approaching $5 billion in lost returns over the next three years. 

State retirement system officials have estimated a loss of more than $1.2 billion in returns over the next three years from more than $8 billion in pension funds if managers drop Wyoming as a client. Separately, Wyoming’s Chief Investment Officer Patrick Fleming estimated lost revenue at around $3.5 billion from the more than $30 billion his office manages. 

The conflict is fueling fierce debate in the House. Lawmakers long-familiar with the state’s investment funds like Nicholas, R-Cheyenne, and Rep. Steve Harshman, R-Casper, spoke passionately against the bill, saying the House was ignoring people Wyoming had both hired, and in State Treasurer Curt Meier’s case elected, to manage the public’s money. 

“We’re debating whether or not the investment professionals that we hire are wrong or right,” Nicholas said. “They’ve got the biggest flashing red light up that you can see.” 

During Harshman’s tenure as House speaker, from 2016-2020, he leveraged returns from the state’s trust funds to protect public education through lean budget years. On Tuesday, he sought to defend those assets. The state’s investment pools, built up with mineral royalties, were a “tremendous gift from our forefathers and our energy companies,” that should not be risked, he said. “This is about Wyoming’s future.” 

But Harshman and Nicholas’ camp of traditional Republicans no longer command a voting majority on the House floor. The Freedom Caucus does, and its members pushed the bill through its first chamber vote, 34-26. The caucus accounts for 34 House members, according to public membership lists and campaign endorsements. 

By a similar margin, 33-25, House members voted down an amendment brought by Nicholas that would have struck the penalty for financiers from the bill. That penalty is driving most of the consternation, and even Nicholas said he might back the bill were it taken out. 

But Freedom Caucus lawmakers voiced skepticism of the losses estimated by the state treasurer and managers of the retirement pool, and even some antipathy to those officials. 

“Since when do employees of the state tell us what they will and won’t do for us?” Freedom Caucus member Rep. Pepper Ottman, R-Riverton, said. 

“These financial teams of the state they’re making a lot of money,” she said, referencing the investment team’s compensation. “If they want to go somewhere else … other states are doing the same thing and it’s not going to be that tough.” 

The bill’s primary sponsor, Gillette Republican Rep. Christopher Knapp, offered a more measured defense of the bill. Knapp amended the legislation in response to oppositional testimony during a Friday committee hearing. 

But Knapp stuck by the penalty. “All I’m trying to do is codify what those investment managers follow today,” Knapp said during Tuesday’s debate. “Yes that should be written into a contract,” with fund managers, he said. “Yes, [a contract] that will hold people accountable.”

After Nicholas’ amendment failed, lawmakers passed a second one, cosponsored by Knapp. That tweak exempted state employees, but not outside money managers, from the penalties. 

Monday, after adopting Knapp’s previous amendment, the House Minerals, Business and Economic Development Committee sent the bill to the House floor without taking further public testimony. The committee’s Freedom Caucus members overruled two of their Republican colleagues who sought to reopen testimony and gauge how state officials viewed the change. 

Treasurer Meier warned last week that “the better half of my staff are all going to walk out the door,” if the bill passes. He has not since publicly weighed in on the measure’s impacts in the wake of Knapp’s changes. 

But Nicholas told his colleagues both Fleming, the chief investment officer, and officials managing the pension fund are sticking by their estimates of dire losses. 

Other lawmakers told their colleagues that the news of potential pension fund losses has spawned waves of concerned calls from retired state employees. 

The bill is part of the Freedom Caucus’ “five and dime” plan — a package of legislation the bloc has pledged to pass by next week to demonstrate its ability to lead the House. 

On the floor Tuesday, one of the Minerals Committee members, Rep. Martha Lawley of Worland, reiterated her frustrations with the committee’s choice not to work on the bill further before sending it to the House floor. 

“It’s not a small matter at all,” she said. “We owe [voters] to get it right. I don’t understand why we are rushing this across an imaginary goal line. In their view, we are not authorized to play politics with their retirement fund.” 

A video is being shared across platforms alongside claims it shows twin fire tornadoes ripping through California as wildfires torched the Los Angeles area in January 2025. But the clip is unrelated; a reverse image search found it was taken in the state of Wyoming in August 2024, and this was confirmed by the volunteer firefighter who filmed it.

“Fire tornadoes in California,” says a January 11, 2025 post on X from “Sprinter Observer,” an anonymous account that has repeatedly spread disinformation under various aliases.

Similar posts shared the video — a short clip showing two fiery twisters in an open field — across X and other platforms, including Instagram, Threads and LinkedIn.

The posts follow more than a week of wildfires that have razed wide swaths of America’s second-largest city, forcing tens of thousands of people to flee their homes and burning more than 40,000 acres. At least 27 people had died in the wind-driven flames as of January 19.

Video footage shows the extreme weather has whipped up fire tornadoes, towering funnels of flame that can thrash across a landscape.

But the clip of fire tornadoes circulating online predates the California blazes — and was filmed several states away Wyoming.

A reverse image search surfaced the same footage published in August 2024 by a local radio station (archived here).

The outlet cited a Facebook user whose post revealed the video originated on TikTok with Michelle Reinke, the owner of a home decor store in Wyoming and a volunteer firefighter (archived here and here).

Reinke posted the video August 23, 2024, with a caption saying it showed the Remington Fire burning through Clearmont and Arvada, Wyoming. “This was my biggest fire yet since joining the Clearmont Volunteer Fire District,” Reinke wrote.

Reinke also posted a trimmed version of the footage days later (archived here).

Reached by Facebook messenger January 17, 2025, Reinke confirmed the footage was hers and captured the August blazes in her state.

“I filmed the video in Wyoming on Aug 22, 2024, as I am a volunteer fire fighter for Clearmont, Arvada, Ucross and Wyarno fire district,” she told AFP, adding that many posts online have tried to “pass off” the clip as a scene from California.

Reinke, who said she licensed the clip to the video-licensing company ViralHog, shared iPhone metadata with AFP corroborating that the clip was captured August 22 at GPS coordinates in Clearmont (archived here).

Google Earth satellite imagery maps the coordinates to an area with what appear to be matching topographical features (archived here). The coordinates are also near those listed on a government website for the Remington Fire (archived here).

The Clearmont Fire District included a picture of the same fire tornadoes as part of an August 25 post sharing photos of the Remington Fire.

Josh McKinley, the Clearmont Fire District Chief, told USA Today he took photos and videos of the twisters and was “standing over the right shoulder” of the volunteer firefighter as she recorded the footage in question.

AFP reached out to McKinley for additional comment, but no response was forthcoming.

AFP has debunked other misinformation about the wildfires here.

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.