MALTA — This weekend, a new museum will open in this tiny northcentral Montana farming community to showcase some of the world’s most remarkable dinosaurs, but the superstar, Leonardo, won’t be there for the grand opening.
Instead, the rare, mummified, 77-million-year-old duck-billed dinosaur — a brachylophosaurus — will be in Texas, where he’s expected to enthrall millions of visitors to the Houston Museum of Natural Science for the next year.
However, a life-sized replica of Leonardo will be on hand at the grand opening of the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum just across the parking lot from the Phillips County Museum.
Festivities begin Friday evening with a special program to honor the folks who made the new museum possible, including the state legislators who persuaded the state to come up with a $500,000 grant and the state Department of Commerce, which built it.
People are also reading…
The 3,000-square-foot building bears a price tag of just $600,000 and is designed to attract attention in the small town.
“This is an unusual building for Malta,” said Anne Boothe, executive director of the Phillips County Economic Growth Council. “It looks like a piece of Seattle in Montana, but it fits. Some people call it a windbreak and others call it a grain elevator, but I think people will notice it and want to go into it.” And it’s a huge community effort, with a lot of volunteer time and effort. “We have a lot of IOUs out there,” Boothe grinned.
The new museum is Malta’s way of seizing on a tremendous opportunity presented to the community by Nate Murphy, the former amateur paleontologist who made a number of incredible dinosaur finds.
In 1994, Murphy discovered an immaculate, complete and uncrushed brachylophosaurus skeleton that he named Elvis. Then in 2000 came Leonardo, only the fourth dinosaur in the world to be found with mummified skin, body tissue and organs. Roberta, an almost complete skeleton with her slender neck arched in a death pose, followed the next year. After that came Peanut, a partially preserved juvenile with some skin impressions. All are duck-bills.
Mark Thompson, an Australian paleontologist working with Murphy in 2000, remembers vividly escorting a party of 12 diggers when Leonardo was found.
“I was coming around a coulee when I heard someone shout, ‘Guys, I’ve found a dinosaur,”‘ Thompson said. “Well, I thought he’d found a piece of bone or a tooth so I shouted back, ‘So what?’ “And he shouted back, ‘No, I’ve found the whole thing.”‘ Racing to the hillside, Thompson could clearly see three articulated vertebrae.
“And that showed there was more of the animal in there,” he said. “We could look through the back section of his pelvis into the guts of the animal where a cliff had fallen away and exposed it, so we knew the rest of the animal was there.
“And we could see it had been buried exceptionally quickly, so quickly that it had not been picked apart by scavengers,” he said.
Apparently, Leonardo was either killed in a mud slide or buried by it hours after his death, which also preserved his skin and organs as fossils.
As the news of that remarkable find spread, Bob Bakker, paleo curator of the Houston Museum of Natural Science, was leading a dig in Wyoming and decided to make a quick trip north to put that unlikely rumor to rest.
“I was skeptical about Leonardo, that he was a dino mummy with plant material in his guts,” confessed Bakker last week. “But when I came to the Field Station, I could clearly see his skin. Then I saw chewed plant material in his gut.
“And it was obvious to me that Leonardo was exactly what they said it was.” Bakker was so impressed that the Houston Museum of Natural Science arranged to borrow Leonardo for a year, returning 10 percent of the $15 admission charge to the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum, plus a good chunk of the gift shop sales.
The museum in Houston averages about 3½ million visitors a year, so that could provide enough money to expand the museum in Malta. It will also get royalties as an exhibit featuring the Leonardo replica tours the country for the next five to nine years.
For the past few years, these world-class dinosaurs have been stored in the Malta Dinosaur Field Station, a former auto mechanic workshop where only a few hundred visitors a year could see them.
“This is a field station, a prep lab, but now we’re moving into a full museum,” exclaimed Sue Frary, coordinator of the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum.
The museum, one of the crown jewels of the Montana Dinosaur Trail, was designed to be yet another boost for tourism along the Hi-Line.
“We couldn’t have a better location for this museum,” said Department of Commerce Director Anthony Preite. “Building the museum next to the existing historical society creates a cultural destination on Montana’s Hi-Line. We have world-class fossils up there, and now the world has another reason to check us out.” And indeed, that’s happening. Last weekend, CBS news had a national producer in Malta and ABC News sent a crew up from Houston to film the area in which Leonardo was found. Both shows are being produced to preview Leonardo’s grand opening in Houston next September.
Even more significant, however, is the growing partnership between the museum in Houston and the brand new museum in Malta. Houston has a population 2.14 million within the city limits, but 5.6 million in its 10-county metropolitan area; Malta has a population of 2,120.
At a gathering last week at the Rusty Nail Lodge owned by Lanny and Sharon Icenogle, a contingent from the Houston Museum discussed that relationship.
