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.
The Platte County Attorney’s Office has nearly doubled the possible penalties for a Wyoming reporter accused of forging exhibits in an environmental case tied to her staunch opposition to a wind farm.
The 10 new counts against April Marie Morganroth, also known as the Wyoming-based reporter Marie Hamilton, allege that she convinced her landlords that she’d been approved for a home loan to buy their property, and grants to upgrade it.
Hamilton was already facing 10 felony charges in a March 9 Wheatland Circuit Court case, as she’s accused of submitting forged documents and lying under oath before the Wyoming Industrial Siting Council.
That’s an environmental permitting panel that granted a permit to a NextEra Resources wind farm, which Hamilton has long opposed. She’s also reported on NextEra’s efforts and the community controversies surrounding those.
Then on Wednesday, Platte County Attorney Douglas Weaver filed 10 more felony charges: five alleging possession of forged writing, and five more alleging forgery.
The former is punishable by up to five years in prison and $5,000 in fines; the latter by up to 10 years in prison and up to $10,000 in fines.
Hamilton faces up to 65 years in prison if convicted of all charges in her March 9 case. The March 25 case would add up to 75 years more to that.
Both cases are ongoing.
Hamilton did not immediately respond to a voicemail request for comment left Thursday afternoon on her cellphone. She bonded out of jail earlier this month. The Platte County Detention Center said Thursday it does “not have her here.”
The Investigative Efforts Of Benjamin Peech
Converse County Sheriff’s Lt. Benjamin Peech investigated both cases at the request of Platte County authorities, court documents say.
When he was investigating evidence that Hamilton submitted forged documents and lied under oath for Industrial Siting Council proceedings, Peech also pursued Hamilton’s claim that she owned property on JJ Road, and that she’d bought it with a U.S. Department of Agriculture loan.
The property, however, is registered under Platte County’s mapping system to a couple surnamed Gillis, says a new affidavit Peech signed March 19, which was filed Wednesday.
Peech spoke with both husband and wife, and they said they had the home on the market to sell it, and Hamilton contacted them in about July of 2025.
Hamilton told the pair that she and her husband wished to buy the property and were pre-qualified for a USDA loan through Neighbor’s Bank, wrote Peech.
But the property didn’t meet the standard of the loan, Hamilton reportedly continued. Still, she’d been approved for a USDA grant to work on the problems with the property and bring it up to the standards to qualify for the loan, she allegedly told the homeowners.
Papers
Hamilton provided the couple and their realtor with letters from USDA showing her loan pre-approval and grant approvals, the affidavit says.
During the lease period that followed, Hamilton was late “often” with rent and didn’t provide the couple with work logs until pressed, Peech wrote.
In early 2026, the lieutenant continued, the homeowners became concerned and asked Hamilton about her progress improving the property.
Hamilton reportedly sent the homeowners two invoices from contractors, showing she’d paid for work to be done. She said the wind had delayed that work, wrote Peech.
The affidavit says the Gillis couple sent Peech the documents Hamilton had reportedly given them, along with supporting emails showing those had come from one of Hamilton’s email addresses.
The Loan approval documents showed the respective logos for USDA Rural Development and Neighbor’s Bank at the top of each page, the lieutenant wrote, adding that the documents assert that Hamilton and her husband had been approved for the loan.
“There was then a list of items that needed to be completed — 14 items — prior to Final Loan Approval,” related Peech in the affidavit.
A signature at the bottom reportedly read, “Sincerely, USDA Rural Development Neighbors Bank Joshua Harris Homebuying Specialist.”
Grant Document
The documents purporting Hamilton had received a grant also showed the USDA Rural Development logo at the top of each page, with the names of Hamilton and her husband, other boilerplate language and a description of a $35,000 home buyer’s grant.
The project was about 65% complete at the time of review, the document adds, according to Peech’s narrative.
Peech describes more documents: a January notice, an invoice bearing the logo and name of “Cowgirl Demolition and Excavation, LLC,” and another invoice bearing the logo and name of “Pete’s Builders Roofing and Restoration.”
Real Estate Agent
Peech spoke with the Gillises’ real estate agent, Kay Pope, and she said she’d tried to verify the USDA grant and pre-approval by calling Susan Allman, who was listed in the documents as the Casper-based USDA agent. Pope left several messages without response, the affidavit says.
Pope spoke with Hamilton’s real estate agent, and he said he’d spoken to Allman, and he gave Pope a phone number.
Cowboy State Daily has identified Hamilton’s real estate agent and tried to contact him for further clarification.
Pope called that number and left messages without response, wrote Peech.
Peech then called a USDA Rural Development office and spoke with a Janice Blare, deputy state director, he wrote.
Peech sent the three USDA letters to Blare and gave her “all of Hamilton’s names and aliases,” he added.
The lieutenant wrote that Blare later told him the USDA investigated the letters and determined no evidence existed to show the USDA had issued them.
No records existed either, of Hamilton “using all her alias permutations” or her husband within either the USDA loan program or grant program, wrote Peech.
The USDA didn’t have an office at the address listed in two of the letters. The address pertains, rather, to a dirt lot. The USDA Rural Development office didn’t have a program titled “Rural Communities Home Buyer Program” as listed on two of the letters.
On Nov. 6, 2025, the date of the first letter purporting Hamilton had been approved for the grant program, all U.S. government offices including USDA were on furlough, noted Peech from his discussion with Blare.
A person named Susan Allman didn’t appear in USDA’s employee records, Blare reportedly added.
The Phone Call
Peech called the cellphone number one of the letters listed for Allman, “and this was disconnected,” he wrote.
The number Hamilton’s real estate agent had given was a voice over internet protocol number that Bandwidth LLC operates but is assigned to Google, added Peech.
Meanwhile, Converse County Investigator Amber Peterson spoke with the construction and roofing companies listed in the documents.
Chad Derenzo of Pete’s Roofing confirmed the logo and name listed on the documents were his company’s own — but said his company hadn’t issued the bid listed in those documents, according to the affidavit.
“Their company had never contracted to do work for Hamilton or at the… JJ Road address,” the document says.
The invoice also bore an address in Torrington, Wyoming, and his company doesn’t have a Torrington office, said Derenzo, reportedly.
Jessica Loge of Cowgirl Demolition and Excavation gave similar statements, saying the documents bore her logo, but her company hadn’t issued the bid or contracted with Hamilton.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
Wyoming
Wyoming State Parks announces pause on potential visitor center project at Sinks Canyon State Park
Wyoming
Coyote Flats Fire near containment as critical fire danger hits Black Hills, Wyoming counties
RAPID CITY, S.D. (KOTA) – The grass is starting to return in the Black Hills, but the damage left behind by last week’s wildfire is still visible beneath the surface. The Coyote Flats Fire is now almost completely contained, but fire officials say the work for crews who battled the flames is far from finished.
“It’s been a long week,” said Gail Schmidt, fire chief for the Rockerville Volunteer Fire Department. Schmidt said firefighters worked the Coyote Flats Fire for multiple days as the blaze forced hundreds of people to leave their homes.
Schmidt also warned the timing is concerning.
“It’s early,” she said. “It’s early — and that’s the more concerning part. We haven’t even hit summer yet.”
Some of the same crews, Schmidt said, have moved from the Black Hills to a second wildfire — the Qury (pronounced “Koo-RAY”) Fire. That fire has burned nearly 9,200 acres and was holding at 70% containment as of Monday.
Between multiple wildfires and routine emergency calls, Schmidt said the pace doesn’t slow down.
“The world does not stop just because there was a fire,” she said. “Life continues. We still have our day jobs that we need to go take care of.”
Another challenge arrives Wednesday, with critical fire danger forecast across the Black Hills and into parts of Wyoming, including Sheridan, Campbell, Crook and Weston counties. Forecast conditions include wind gusts up to 40 mph and humidity as low as 12%.
Schmidt said she believes fire lines are in good shape, but she’s watching the weather closely after recent high-wind events.
“Saturday night, 50 mile an hour winds — that was multiple days ago, and there’s been a lot of work done since,” she said. “I personally am pretty confident that we’re going to be able to hold this fire through today.”
While spring is typically the region’s wetter season — which can help reduce fire behavior — Schmidt urged residents not to become complacent as wildfire season ramps up.
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