Dinosaur museum lines up cast of ‘Baby Toni’

A $25,000 grant from the Big Horn Rural Electric Company will allow the Big Horn Basin Dinosaur and Geoscience Museum (BHBDGM) to add the cast of yet another dinosaur to the list of exhibits for its proposed 3,500 square foot museum on Greybull Avenue.

Erik Kvale, who serves on the museum’s eight-member board of directors, said the cast will be of “Baby Toni,” which he described as “the only fully articulated, 95% complete in terms of bone count, baby sauropod known to science.”  

A sauropod is a long neck and long tail plant eating dinosaur. 

According to Kvale, the most recent research suggest that Baby Toni could be a Diplodocus. The specimen was collected from the famous Howe-Stephens Quarry near Shell by Swiss paleontologist Dr. Kirby Siber and his crew in the early 2000s. The original is on display in the Sauier Museum at Aathal-Seegraben, Switzerland. 

The cast will take approximately three months to construct but there could be as much as a two-year wait before casting and shipping from the time the order is placed with the Black Hills Institute, which has the casting rights for Baby Toni. 

“The BHBDGM now has on order, or in its possession, casts of 24 extremely rare allosaur eggs, which will be part of a reconstructed allosaur nest found between Greybull and Shell, as well as casts of a juvenile allosaur (Al Junior), and the most complete adult allosaur (Big Al 2) ever discovered. 

“Allosaurs were large meat-eating dinosaurs that were distant ancestral cousins to the Tyrannosaurus rex. All of these fossils were found in sites/quarries in the Greybull Shell area. The casts will be exhibited in settings that will illustrate the lives of these ancient animals, the world they lived in, their histories of excavation, and their importance to the scientific world.”

Progress

Since the launch of its “Bring ‘em Home” capital campaign in mid-December of 2023, the BHBDGM has raised more than $194,000 of its initial fund-raising goal of $400,000 to obtain world class Jurassic fossils found in the Greybull-Shell area.  

The effort now has its sights set on acquiring its last two museum quality casts: “Sarah/Sophie,” the world’s most complete Stegosaurus found at Red Canyon Quarry north of Shell and now on display at the London Museum of Natural History, and “HQ1” a composited Diplodocus found at the Howe-Stephens Quarry and now on display in Switzerland.

The BHBDGM is currently partnering with the Town of Greybull, who is pursuing funds to construct a building in Greybull in which to house the BHBDGM collection and displays.

On the building front, the progress has been slower. Carrie Hunt, Greybull’s town administrator and finance director, said she’s working with MC2 to find grant funding to construct the building.  MC2 is a Sheridan-based company with expertise in grant writing for all sorts of projects.  

“Currently the availability of grants allowing for construction on new is somewhat limited, but I haven’t spent a ton of time pursuing it either,” Hunt said. We do have a couple of options that we are looking at.”

Kvale and other BHBDGM directors have tried to assist, visiting and urging local business and community leaders to write letters of support for the museum. “The (town) needs these letters of support to bolster their efforts to obtain outside grants from various funding agencies,” he wrote in a letter.

Kvale’s enthusiasm for the project has not waned. Under the terms of its deal with the BHBDGM, the town has until the end of 2027 to show definite progress on the building.  

“We’ve known that this is a long, ongoing process that won’t happen overnight,” he said. “We’d like to see it happen next year if we could.  Raising money in an area like this is a challenging, but not impossible task.

“I’m optimistic this will happen — whether it’s in Greybull or Shel — and I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to bring our famous fossils home and build exhibits that are educational, meaningful and real assets to the community.  But we need people in our community, and I mean Greybull, to share in our vision. If they share in our vision and help us make it happen, it will happen.”

Information regarding the fossils that will be included in the dinosaur museum, how to donate, and conceptual architectural drawings of the museum can be found on the BHBDGM website at bighornbasindinos.org or you can email questions or comments to the BHBDGM at info@bighornbasindinos.org.

Earlier this week, Kvale announced the addition of an eighth board member.  Andrew Rossi, who spent several years overseeing the development of displays and educational programs at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center before joining the Cowboy State Daily, joins Kvale, Bill Hayes, Nolan O’Neal, Mart Hinckley, Gene Elliott, Nicole Greene and Angela Botzer.