CODY — A new $20 million, 2,000-acre statewide shooting complex broke ground Saturday south of Cody, with plans to officially open in 2027.

Community members and state representatives have worked on the project since 2022. Once complete, it will be Wyoming’s first-ever statewide shooting complex.

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Wyoming officials break ground on $20 million statewide shooting complex near Cody

The facility will be a first of it’s kind, with 8 different types of firing ranges open to both the public and for regional competitions. Hundreds gathered for the groundbreaking on Saturday, including longtime Cody-area resident Samuel Kuntz.

“I figured this is a historic event and I wanted to be part of it,” Kuntz said Saturday afternoon. “This is fantastic and it will fit right in with the spirit of this community.”

Kuntz said the facility belongs in his home state.

“Shooting is a very big passion of mine,” Kuntz said. “In my opinion, it is paramount to not only being a Wyoming citizen but a U.S. citizen. So, having this wonderful shooting range this close to home is going to be fantastic I am extremely pumped up about it.”

Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon and Wyoming Senator John Barrasso attended the groundbreaking and fired the first two ceremonious shots. The facility is being built on state land and required various legislation to approve $10 million in funding from the government.

That lengthy process began with State Senator Larry Hicks, who brought the idea forward four years ago.

“I just authored a bill called the Second Amendment Defense Act,” Hicks said.

That bill, followed by a phone call with the Governor, started the process in 2022. Hicks said it required many different community members and other entities but that he’s proud to see it become a reality because of what it represents.

“Part of it’s our culture, you know?” Hicks said. “Wyoming has the highest gun ownership in the nation. So, it’s consistent with I think the values and the philosophy that I think the vast majority of people in the state of Wyoming share.”

Board member James Klessens was among the many that helped bring the idea to life, focusing on the facility’s potential economic impact.

“The main premise of the project has been economic development,” Klessens said. “It was created to attract more people to the community as tourists, visitors to the community, but we also know that when we host these kind of events that the shooting industry will play closer attention to those communities.”

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Klessens and Hicks both agreed that the facility could bring other businesses to the area, and with travelers coming from all across the competitions, it could provide a major economic boost.

“Ultimately, I just think this is going to be a win-win for Wyoming,” Hicks said.

Kuntz, and many others, couldn’t agree more.

“Whether it’s for self-defense, hunting or just for fun, it is part of the Wyoming spirit,” Kuntz said.

A Wyoming judge temporarily blocked the state’s newest abortion limit, halting enforcement of a law that prohibits most abortions once a fetal heartbeat can be detected, generally around six weeks of pregnancy.

Natrona County District Judge Dan Forgey on Friday granted temporary injunctive relief against the Human Heartbeat Act while the case plays out in court.

The plaintiffs “made a sufficient showing of irreparable injury,” Forgey wrote, adding that “the state defendants did not persuasively argue otherwise.”

He also said the plaintiffs had made “a sufficient showing of probable success” under Article 1, Section 38 of the Wyoming Constitution, which protects individuals’ rights to make their own healthcare decisions.

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The ruling is the latest turn in Wyoming’s long-running abortion fight and comes just months after the Wyoming Supreme Court struck down two earlier abortion restrictions, finding they violated the state constitution’s healthcare autonomy protections. That January decision reshaped the legal landscape in Wyoming and prompted lawmakers to try again with a narrower ban tied to the detection of fetal cardiac activity.

The law, passed during the Legislature’s 2026 session and signed by Republican Gov. Mark Gordon on March 9, took effect in March. It bars abortion beyond roughly the sixth week of pregnancy, once a fetal heartbeat is detected. The measure includes exceptions for medical emergencies that threaten a woman’s life or health, but not for pregnancies caused by rape or incest.

“Where the act does not align to my pro-life stance is in the concern for specific vulnerable populations,” Gordon wrote in a letter to lawmakers Monday.

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It echoes his reservations and expected legal fight when signing the law in March.

“I resoundingly share the determination to defend the lives of unborn children and support the intentions behind the Human Heartbeat Act,” he wrote in a statement. “Regrettably, this Act represents another well-intentioned but likely fragile legal effort with significant risk of ending in the courts rather than in lasting, durable policy. Rather than finding a remedy that saves the unborn, I fear we have only added another chapter to the sad saga of repeatedly trying to force a specific solution.”

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Gordon’s signing made Wyoming the fifth state to bar most abortions at that stage of pregnancy, along with Florida, Georgia, Iowa and South Carolina. Thirteen other states bar abortion at all stages of pregnancy, with some exceptions.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The Tate Geological Museum at Casper College is showcasing a first-of-its-kind fossil from Niobrara County. 

The 2-foot-long bladed structure belonged to one of Wyoming’s extremely elusive giant squids.

According to J.P. Cavigelli, the museum’s collections specialist, this “big chunk of calamari” has tentatively been identified as part of the internal shell of a Niobrarateuthis, a giant squid that lived in Wyoming’s last ocean around 80 million years ago.

“We found it last year,” he said. “If I told you any more, I’d have to kill you and all your readers.”

Cavigelli is very protective of this squid and the spot where it was found because it’s a rare and unique find for Wyoming. 

There could be more giant squid and other prehistoric monsters of the deep waiting to be found there.

“It’s the last time the ocean was here, according to traditional dogma,” he said.

Monster Of The Not Too Deep

The fossil recovered by the Tate is a partial gladius, the hard bone-like structure inside the otherwise soft bodies of squid. 

It’s the same as a cuttlebone in a cuttlefish, itself a modern relative of this prehistoric squid.

“We call it the squid pen,” Cavigelli said. “It’s not bone, but I guess you could call it a skeleton, of some sort.”

Cavigelli said this giant squid was found in the Sharon Springs member of the Pierre Shale, a rock layer from the Late Cretaceous Period. 

It preserves the inhabitants of the Western Interior Seaway, an inland sea that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean.

“It’s a black shale from the bottom of the ocean that split North America in half,” he said. “It wasn’t a very deep ocean but pretty expansive.”

The prehistoric squid pen is incomplete, but still over two feet long. That’s enough to quantify it as a truly giant squid.

“We saw (a squid pen) in a North Dakota museum that was five or six feet long and really thick, which would have been a really big animal,” Cavigelli said. “Ours is large, so still from a big animal, but not that huge.”

How big? It’s hard to say.

Paleontologists believe Niobrarateuthis and contemporaneous cephalopods could grow up to 10 feet long, and possibly much larger depending on the length of their tentacles.

“They could have been long or very short,” he said. “All we know is that it was much bigger than your average squid.”

Secretive Squids

Modern-day scientists are struggling to learn much about today’s giant squids. Paleontologists have an even harder time trying to understand prehistoric giant squids, especially given the rarity of their fossils.

Not much is known about North America’s prehistoric giant squids. 

Just like today’s squid and octopuses, most of their bodies were composed of soft tissue rather than hard parts, meaning they usually decomposed before they could be buried and fossilized.

Did Niobrarateuthis have long, terrifying tentacles like the modern-day colossal squid, or several smaller tentacles like today’s cuttlefish and Humboldt squid? 

According to Cavigelli, either is possible.

“We don’t know enough about it to give it long tentacles,” he said. “I’m sure it had tentacles, because all squids do, but we wouldn’t be able to say how long they were, because that’s quite variable in squids.”

A squid might not even be the best modern analogy for Niobrarateuthis. 

Although they outwardly resembled squids, paleontologists believe the Pierre Shale’s cephalopods are more closely related to modern-day octopuses.

The Tate’s fossilized gladius came from the back end of the giant squid. In life, the gladius was surrounded by a large, fleshy mass containing all the internal organs called the mantle.

A giant, squishy squid would have been appetizing dinner option for many of Wyoming’s sea monsters.

It’s What’s For Dinner

From what paleontologists can determine, Niobrarateuthis and the giant squids of the Western Interior Seaway would have had a healthy seafood diet of everything from plants and algae to crabs, fish, and each other. 

They would have processed this varied diet with an extremely strong beak, the only other hard part in modern and prehistoric cephalopods.

Meanwhile, even a fully-grown, 10-foot-long giant squid might not have been big enough to stay off the menu of the Western Interior Seaway’s biggest sea monsters.

Giant marine reptiles were at the top of the Pierre Shale’s food chain. One of the largest of these, the mosasaur Tylosaurus, might have grown over 50 feet long, with a 5.6-foot skull.

With such a big head, full of dozens of serrated teeth, a Niobrarateuthis would have made a soft, substantive meal for a fully-grown Tylosaurus. Fortunately, there’s fossilized evidence supporting this predator-prey interaction.

A large squid pen at the Museum of Natural History at the University of Colorado Boulder was found with a huge kink in the middle. 

It belonged to Tusoteuthis, another species of giant squid that lived in the Western Interior Seaway.

Multiple grooves found on this Tusoteuthis specimen matched the size and shape of mosasaur teeth. That suggests the giant squid might have survived a failed predation attempt by a large Tylosaurus.

Cephalopods of all sizes were extremely abundant in prehistoric seas. 

Smaller squid pens are among the most common fossils found in many marine deposits from the Mesozoic Era and often turn up in the stomachs of marine reptiles.

“I think mosasaurs would have had a great time with them,” Cavigelli said.

Searching for Sea Monsters

Niobrarateuthis and the other denizens of the Pierre Shale went extinct when the Western Interior Seaway disappeared.

The Tate’s Niobrarateuthis gladius was prepared by fossil preparator Bryan Aivazian. It’s currently on display in the museum’s lobby.

Cavigelli said giant squid fossils are an incredible find anywhere in Wyoming. 

In addition to their inherent rarity, there aren’t many spots in the state where the Sharon Springs member of the Pierre Shale is exposed and accessible.

“You can find fossils in it, but there aren’t many spots where you’d expect to find these things, and the preservation is typically pretty lousy,” he said.

Other rare specimens from Wyoming’s Pierre Shale exposures include the huge-eyed Unktaheela and the long-snouted Serpentisuchops. 

These are both polycotylid plesiosaurs, a family of marine reptiles that probably would have enjoyed feeding on Niobrarateuthis while the giant squid was young and bite-sized.

Notable specimens from the same formation include the 15-foot-long, three-ton sea turtle Archelon, the 34-foot-long plesiosaur Elasmosaurus, 20-foot-long cannibalistic fish, and the famous flying reptile Pteranodon.

The Tate’s squid pen was found during a field trip for participants of the museum’s annual paleontological conference in May 2025. 

That’s why Cavigelli will continue to be excited and secretive about the spot where this squid surfaced.

“We collected the squid and the first Cretaceous marine bird bones from Wyoming in about three hours on the same trip,” he said. “I’d say it was a pretty good field trip.”

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