Where the Highway Heads guides find deep time: tracks pressed into a riverbed, a mammoth with butchery marks on its bones, exposed fossil beds older than the trees, and seven concrete dinosaurs a Depression-era work crew put on a hill.
11 stops across 9 states, taken from the Highway Heads city guides.
Colorado
Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument
Petrified redwood stumps up to 14 feet wide and thousands of detailed insect and plant fossils, in a mountain valley 35 miles west of Colorado Springs. It is a National Park Service site, so entry rules and fees follow federal policy rather than the city's: $10 per adult age 16 or older, with visitors ages 15 and under admitted free.
Connecticut
Yale Peabody Museum's Great Hall of Dinosaurs
A mounted juvenile Brontosaurus displayed beneath the 110-foot Age of Reptiles mural, in a museum whose own site counts over 14 million specimens and objects.
Kentucky
Falls of the Ohio State Park
Across the river in Clarksville, Indiana: 390-million-year-old Devonian fossil beds exposed along the Ohio River, plus an interpretive center overlooking them. The rapids here stopped river traffic, and the communities on both banks, Louisville included, were settled because of them.
Minnesota
Science Museum of Minnesota
On the Mississippi River bluff downtown, with the Mississippi River Gallery (river ecology and the National Park upriver), a strong dinosaur hall including a Triceratops mount, and a large-format Omnitheater.
North Dakota
North Dakota Heritage Center & State Museum
Free admission to the state museum, right on the Capitol grounds, doubled in size by a 127,000-square-foot 2014 expansion. The mummified Edmontosaurus with fossilized skin is one of the rarest dinosaur specimens on public display anywhere.
South Dakota
Museum of Geology
Opened the same year as the South Dakota School of Mines itself, in 1885, with its public exhibits housed since 1944 in the O’Harra Building on campus. The collection focuses on fossils and minerals from South Dakota and the Northern Great Plains, and it’s free — a serious research museum that most road-trippers walk right past.
Dinosaur Park
Seven WPA-built concrete dinosaurs dedicated May 22, 1936 on a hilltop above downtown, designed by Emmet Sullivan with measurements provided by a curator from the American Museum of Natural History. It’s free, it’s open-air, and it’s been a roadside landmark for close to ninety years.
Texas
Dinosaur Valley State Park, Glen Rose
Real dinosaur tracks, not casts, pressed into the bed of the Paluxy River about 113 million years ago. Texas Parks and Wildlife credits nine-year-old George Adams with finding the first three-toed tracks here in 1909. The Park Service says fossil collector R.T. Bird arrived in November 1938; the sauropod trackways he worked on became important evidence in a long argument over whether sauropods could move on land at all.
Wisconsin
Kenosha Public Museum
A 2001 museum on the lakefront whose centerpiece is a 12,500-year-old woolly mammoth skeleton found in nearby Kenosha County — with cut marks that are considered some of the oldest evidence of human butchering in North America. Free admission.
Dinosaur Discovery Museum
Opened 2006 in the historic Old Post Office. The permanent exhibit is a hall of full-size mounted theropod dinosaur casts, laid out to walk the evolution from small raptors to Tyrannosaurus. Travel Wisconsin’s listing shows free admission.
Wyoming
Tate Geological Museum
A free museum on the Casper College campus built around a real Ice Age giant: Dee, an 11,600-year-old Columbian mammoth the museum calls the world’s largest and most complete mounted specimen of its kind. Open Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., no admission charged.
