4th Favorite Hat – Episode 01 Show Notes

Summary

Andy, Bret, and Bryce dive into what makes Montana’s Two Medicine Formation one of the most scientifically important Late Cretaceous ecosystems in North America. They explain why the formation is named after the Two Medicine River, how volcanic ash and bentonite clay shape fossil preservation, and why baby dinosaur bones, eggs, and nesting sites are unusually common there. The team walks through each member of the formation, the dinosaurs found in them, and how new research is reshaping our understanding of this ancient environment. From hadrosaurs and ceratopsians to raptors, armored dinosaurs, mammals, and pterosaurs, they explore the full menagerie of Two Medicine life and discuss their own ongoing dig at “The Graveyard,” a multitaxic bone bed revealing new species and new mysteries. The result is a lively, informative tour of a formation that continues to surprise paleontologists every year.

Transcript

Andy: Hi, I’m Andy.
Brett: I’m Brett.
Bryce: I’m Bryce.

Andy: And today on Fourth Favorite Hat, we are planning on talking about why we focus on the two medicine formation, what the two medicine formation is, and I’m sure the burning question for everyone, what dinosaurs can we find there?

Andy: So, for starters, two medicine. Why is it called that? Well, Brett, do you have any information on that?

Brett: Yeah, so the two medicine formation is called that because you can actually see good outcroppings of it alongside the two medicine river.
Brett: That’s pretty common in geology. We’ll often see formations named after areas where you can see good outcroppings of them.
Brett: As an example, the Pierre Shale or the Pierre Shale, depending on where you’re from.

Andy: It’s Pierre.

Brett: Well, it depends on where you’re from. You can see that in Pierre, South Dakota. So that’s why it’s called that.
Brett: Lots of the formations will have names based on where they’re found, and this one is found along the two medicine river, which is in kind of northwest Montana.

Andy: And correct me if I’m wrong. Is the two medicine river the only medicine river that’s still named that way?

Brett: That I know of? So, when French fur trappers came, they asked the names of the rivers. Rivers being a great source of clean water were called the medicine rivers.
Brett: So the fur trappers were like, all right, well, they can’t all be the medicine river. This is the one medicine, the two medicine, and, you know, it’s counting.
Brett: But the rest of them have been since renamed. So, that’s the origin.

Bryce: Why is it called the two medicine river? Despite being the only one named that anymore? This is too iconic.

Andy: Oh, I see what you did there. Audience, you can’t tell, but the way Bryce said it, he spelled it T-W-O when he said too iconic.
Andy: Badum-tish. I’m going to need you to up the energy, bud. If you’re going to do a badum-tish, I need some more effort there.

Bryce: Let me try again. All right. Badum-tish.

Andy: That was pretty good.
Andy: It was. Great job.

Bryce: Thank you. Thank you.

Andy: All right. Now you get to talk about the two medicine formation.

Bryce: Oh, no.

Andy: Tell us a little bit about, like, its origin. Like, in terms of, like, its environment or, like, what? I mean, it’s up to you to answer that, how you see fit.
Andy: Yeah. And I may or may not cut this out, depending on how funny this is.

Bryce: Fair enough.
Bryce: All right. So the two medicine, it represents a period of time towards the end of the Cretaceous.
Bryce: When, well, during a good chunk of the late Cretaceous, the Western Intercontinental Seaway divided the continent in half.
Bryce: Its kind of boundaries ebbed and flowed throughout its, you know, when it was around.
Bryce: It started around 120-ish million years, and it kept going until about 60-some-odd million years.
Bryce: At the period of time of the two medicine, which is about 82 to 74, it is in one of the periods where the boundaries have kind of flowed on out.
Bryce: So we are not particularly near the ocean. It’s about 100 miles out from that.
Bryce: So things are a lot more arid. It’s pretty dry. There are two main seasons. You can kind of imagine it like a, like a Savant, like the modern-day Savant to some extent.
Bryce: There are two main seasons, being hot and wet and hot and dry.
Bryce: That kind of paints a certain image for, like, different sorts of preservation that we can have.
Bryce: So we don’t see as much preservation for plant fossils, even though plants were around, albeit they would be pretty different from what we would see today.
Bryce: So in modern-day Montana, you see these big, sprawling grasslands kind of just going out everywhere.
Bryce: Back in the day, grass was just kind of starting, and it wasn’t really very widespread or particularly much here at the time.
Bryce: So instead, we had these big, sprawling, like, fern shrublands. There were palm trees. There were cycads. Things along that kind of nature.

Andy: There were ginkgo trees.

Bryce: Conifers. Yeah.
Bryce: So there was still vegetation, and a lot of that is going to be based off of similar-aged formations and our knowledge of the environments.
Bryce: And also, this is just going to be a good paleontology fact to have.
Bryce: Ferns are old. Think of a point in history, and for the vast majority of it, like, once plants hit the scene, there was probably a fern there.

Andy: Not in the beginning, but afterwards, yeah.

Bryce: Yeah, ferns are… ferns is old.

Brett: Yeah. They really started dominating the landscape during the Jurassic, wasn’t it?

Bryce: I mean, dominating, yes, but they showed up much older.

Brett: Yeah.

Bryce: I mean, like, the first, like, trees were basically, like, big ferns, almost.

Andy: Well, the bryophytes.

Bryce: Yeah.

Andy: Wait, are ferns… One sec. I’m going to be telling on myself real quick, but as I was typing in bryophyte, apparently I searched you at some point, Bryce.

Bryce: What?

Andy: Yeah, it just suggested, like…

Brett: I mean, I get it.

Bryce: Bryce is a popular guy.

Andy: It’s true. It has your full name and security number in the recommended.

Bryce: Hmm.

Brett: I think this guy Andy is something of an admirer.

Andy: I mean, Bryce, everyone’s got to have at least one admirer.

Bryce: That’s true.

Andy: Yeah, he just drew the short straw and got me. Get it? Because he’s short.

Brett: This is an audio thing. For the audience listening, Andy is 5’3″.

Andy: No, I’m not.

Bryce: Sorry. 5’4″. He’s a little sensitive about this.

Andy: Oh, my goodness. This is Andy Slander. I will not stand for it.

Bryce: Andy Slander? Oh, no.

Andy: That’s it. Bryce, as punishment, talk about more of the two medicine formation.

Bryce: Oh.
Bryce: Well, and the reason there was also a question about a volcanism, which, in combination with the previous, you know, deposits from, like, mineral deposits from when the sea was around, led to a mixture of that with volcanic ash, which leads to a very prominent kind of a mudstone in the area, bentonite clay.
Bryce: Now, bentonite is pretty important for the preservation of fossils in the region.
Bryce: Bentonite’s kind of our double-edged sword. It’s gonna be saving us sometimes and dooming us others.

Andy: Yeah.

Bryce: So, case in point, in the two medicine, we have a pretty good amount of preservation for things like baby dinosaur bones, as well as eggshells and eggs.
Bryce: These are both, as you might imagine, very fragile things. They don’t fossilize well all too often.
Bryce: But, the combination of the bentonite clay, which helps to end the, well, since the rocky mountains are pretty nearby, rivers will carry down carbonate.
Bryce: Not carbonate. Oh, jeez. Words. Calcium carbonate. There we go. Calcium carbonate.

Andy: Not only am I not gonna edit that out, I’m going to put it three times over so people hear you stumbling.

Bryce: Oh, no. Ah. Carbonate. Carbonate. Carbonate.
Bryce: Those things kind of together help neutralize the acidity in the ground, which helps prevent the, well, the baby bones and eggshells and things like that from dissolving.
Bryce: They are a lot, they are a lot more fragile and susceptible to different, like, levels of pH than, like, adult bones just because they’re not fully formed.
Bryce: So, they’re not all too resistant when they were actually replaced.

Andy: It’s sort of a grisly concept, but it makes a lot of sense.
Andy: Babies don’t have the outer bone deposits that can really resist a lot of the weaker acids. It’s just that spongy material.
Andy: And, you know, babies are soft.

Bryce: It’s not just the soil that you have to worry about either, though.
Bryce: Like, if a baby’s eaten, you’re not getting fossils from it.

Andy: No.

Brett: They, that doesn’t work out too well, usually. So, you gotta get pretty lucky.

Bryce: Yeah. Even if you’re in an area that’s pretty good for preservation for them.

Andy: And to clarify, we’re the lucky ones. The babies are dead.

Bryce: Yeah. They’re super dead.

Brett: Some actually died in pretty unlucky ways.

Andy: Yeah. Yeah. Funnily enough, tragedy makes it for a pretty good paleontology.
Andy: Dude, there’s nothing worse than when a kid asks you when the eggs are gonna hatch and you kind of have to tell them they’re not.

Bryce: Yeah.

Brett: Wait, they’re not hatching?

Andy: Ideally not. I mean, it’d be cool if they did.
Andy: I would say there’s some unholy machinations afoot if they started hatching suddenly.

Bryce: Hmm.
Bryce: Uh, but yeah.
Bryce: The other, uh, edge to that sword though, of course, with the benthite clay, uh, it’s a swelling clay.
Bryce: Uh, as it gets like kind of wet, it can swell up to, what was it, like 40 times its original size or some such?

Andy: I feel like people are constantly changing what the amount is, so I’m just gonna do the safe bet and say a lot.

Bryce: Yeah.
Bryce: Now, all that swelling and unswelling, while things that you want to be preserved are inside of it, isn’t so good, so it leads to, uh, pretty much all of our bones being broken.
Bryce: They don’t really come very, uh, put together anymore, sadly.
Bryce: We, we have the issue where they’re very high detail because of the calcium preservation.
Bryce: At the microscopic level, these are very well-preserved bones, detail-wise.
Bryce: Um, in terms of being one-piece-wise, they’re not that greatly preserved.
Bryce: Almost never will you find a whole bone in one piece in the two medicine formation.
Bryce: Uh, most of the time you’ll find one bone in like seven pieces next to each other, and you gotta put them back together.

Andy: Yeah, even the sturdier ones like femurs aren’t, or sorry, femora, I believe that’s the proper plural.

Bryce: Indeed.

Andy: Bryce, you say indeed like that Oblivion NPC, I hope you know that.

Bryce: Which one?

Andy: The one that goes indeed.

Bryce: I don’t know if I’m actually familiar with that one, I’ll have to look that up later.
Bryce: I don’t remember all the Oblivion NPCs.

Andy: What? Why not?
Andy: I like, I like the one that goes, goodbye.

Bryce: I know, Bryce.

Andy: You say that to me often.
Andy: So, with our fossils not really coming in one piece, um, that’s kind of why the two medicine formation is a more recently studied formation.

Andy: Back in ye olde times, uh, the, the 1800s, early 1900s, there was a feller named, uh, Barnum Brown.
Andy: And he’s credited as the guy discovering T-Rex. So, kind of a superstar.
Andy: And, uh, he said, I’m gonna paraphrase a bit, I don’t have the paper at hand, we’ve got other ones.
Andy: Uh, but he said four sentences about the two medicine formation.
Andy: It has rocks. The rocks are bad. It has fossils. The fossils are bad.

Andy: It’s not really fair, but I understand what he’s saying.
Andy: The fossils were in a lot of pieces.
Andy: Uh, so nobody studied the two medicine formation for decades.
Andy: It wasn’t until the very end of the 70s, uh, that Marion Branvold Trexler found the first ever discovered baby dinosaur fossils, which led to, uh, huge examples of nesting grounds and, uh, reshaped our whole understanding of dinosaurs, going from big dumb dragons and display pieces to, oh, that’s a, that’s a smart animal.
Andy: It has complex social behavior, and, uh, yeah, theoretically, that could have been figured out much earlier, but Barnum Brown kind of didn’t want to deal with it.

Bryce: Yeah, there’s also the kind of, like, notion at the time where, like, since the Judith River is nearby and it’s a lot easier to work in, it is kind of more of a lowland environment.
Bryce: So the idea was, well, also, what’s the point of working in the two medicine? Because, like, waterways would have washed down the animals that were present there into the lower environment anyway.
Bryce: So, why bother?

Brett: Hindsight’s 20-20.
Brett: With our work, there’s still a lot to uncover with the two medicine formation.
Brett: That’s sort of what kind of we’re working on at the museum, is trying to understand some of the mysteries.
Brett: Uh, our current dig site, titled The Graveyard, man, we’re still trying to figure that one out.
Brett: There is a lot going on there.
Brett: And we’ve only been working on it for about five years now, and we already have over 2,000 bones or fossil elements that have been recovered from it, which is a lot more than you might expect from a single site.

Bryce: Especially since we’re supposed to be finished with this one.

Brett: Mm-hmm.
Brett: So we have a huge bone bed, and normally when you have a huge bone bed like that, it’s almost always going to be, like, one species.
Brett: Normally, it’s, like, one big event that killed, like, one herd of animals or something.
Brett: But we actually have a multi-taxic bone bed where we have a bunch of different types of dinosaurs in there, which is very exciting and very rare.
Brett: Not a lot of sites have both a lot of dinosaurs and a lot of bones. It’s kind of normally one or the other.

Bryce: It’s not just dinosaurs, too. We find freshwater snails in it.
Bryce: Uh, freshwater snail fossils. I need to clarify they’re not modern.
Bryce: And, um, just this summer, we found a lizard jaw for the first time.

Brett: Yeah, so lots of interesting stuff going on there, and we’re going to be hopefully able to tell you more about it as we go on and learn more about the site.
Brett: It’s sort of something I like to tell guests is this site took 74 million years to get to where it is now, and I’ve been working on it for much less time.
Brett: So I don’t know all the answers yet.

Andy: In 74 million years, we’ll know all the answers.

Bryce: Yeah.

Andy: You can quote it. Somewhere around there.
Andy: Don’t worry, I’ll still be working it.
Andy: I also want to say, Bryce, I had a hypothesis about the reason why the hadrosaur material that you study is mostly the back halves.
Andy: This kind of dawned on me earlier.

Bryce: Yeah.

Andy: So the go-to taphonomic explanation is that the hadrosaurs, these big old duckbills, they had ossified tendons, which held their backsides together, and they were also tougher for scavengers to eat through.
Andy: And I think that’s just a convenient cover-up.
Andy: Are you familiar with the mononongal?

Bryce: I can’t say that I am.

Andy: It’s a vampire from the Philippines.
Andy: It’s a lady who would detach her torso from her legs and go flying about and target pregnant women and women about to get married.
Andy: So my hypothesis is that all hadrosaurs were mononongals. And I’m going to need you to write a paper either accepting or refuting that claim.

Bryce: Well, if they were, wouldn’t you just find their front halves separated from their back halves elsewhere?

Andy: Dang, you found the one flaw in my argument.

Bryce: Exactly.
Bryce: That was a close one.
Bryce: All hadrosaurs are going to have to be upturned.

Andy: Bryce, you can cite me on that paper you’re going to write.

Bryce: I will.
Bryce: Thanks. You know what? You could be the first author, even.

Brett: So I know we said that there was pretty much no one working on the two medicine formation after Barnum Brown. That’s mostly true, with one exception.
Brett: A guy by the name of Stebinger was actually doing some pretty good in-depth research on it.
Brett: He was working for the USGS. So he was doing surveys of Montana formations.
Brett: And he was the one who actually described the two medicine formation and the different members of the two medicine formation.
Brett: And he broke it up into kind of three sections, lower, middle, upper.
Brett: But he was actually one of the first people to notice that there was actually quite a lot of material there.
Brett: He said that he spent like a summer working out there with one of his friends.
Brett: And they found 13 different species of dinosaurs.
Brett: And this was in 1913. So even back then, that’s a lot of different species to find.
Brett: In just one summer, most formations, if you guys remember, only have like one to five species in them.
Brett: So for them to find 13 different ones, that’s pretty incredible.
Brett: By now, we know that’s pretty likely. They find all kinds of dinosaurs in the two medicine formation.
Brett: Almost 30 different species now have been discovered there.

Bryce: There’s also the fun thing with the lower, middle, upper members.
Bryce: Normally in formations, you see what’s called, you know, it’s called a couple things. But faunal grating, where an animal doesn’t go extinct immediately, usually.
Bryce: You can see its fossils kind of linger and deplete. Or last into a little bit into a new rock type.
Bryce: There’s a bit of that, sure. But for the most part, there’s some pretty distinct, like, faunal cutoffs in the two medicine formation. And that’s weird.

Brett: I think that also comes because we have so much here.
Brett: Like, oftentimes you have to break it up a little more arbitrarily. Because there’s not as much of diversity to, like, be able to see the differences in between. Right?
Brett: So that’s a little bit of an explanation for that.
Brett: It helps, but not fully, you know?

Bryce: Yeah.
Bryce: Inherently, there’s always a bit of muddling of the waters when you’re looking back in the past.
Bryce: Because of just, like, a preservational bias.
Bryce: We will never really be able to, like, know every single animal that lived there.
Bryce: So we’re kind of just playing on the luck of what actually fossilized and what can be found.
Bryce: Obviously, as time war goes on and we were, and like, paleontologists work those areas more and more.
Bryce: We get a clearer lens. But, so we’re always working towards a better picture.

Brett: Yeah.
Brett: And, I mean, as we discover more new stuff, I mean, we’ll figure out more and more what the environment was actually like back then.
Brett: How these animals lived.
Brett: And, as I said, we’re finding new stuff all the time in the two medicine.

Bryce: Yeah.
Bryce: We’re only getting better.
Bryce: And that’s, well, this is weirdly uplifting for our thing.
Bryce: But science is all about just building up the knowledge store for collective use.
Bryce: You know, we’re building it so future people have something bigger to pull from.

Brett: Yeah.
Brett: Speaking of building the future and getting clearer knowledge, actually, just last year, in 2024, there was a really good paper done on the two medicine formation by Rogers et al.
Brett: Where they actually looked back at the two medicine formation. They looked at all the finds and everything. They looked at all the rocks.
Brett: And they actually kind of went through and they did a bunch of dating and actually redefined the formation.
Brett: And they decided there wasn’t actually three layers to it, lower, middle, and upper. There’s actually four members now that have been broken it up into.
Brett: So this is kind of on the cutting edge of paleontology is going on right now in two medicine formation.
Brett: And we’re even finding new dinosaurs.
Brett: Now, before we get to the new ones, we can cover the ones that have been previously known.
Brett: But this is an exciting place to work.

Andy: I’ve had people ask, what if when I’m old enough to be a paleontologist, these are usually kids, what if all the fossils are found?
Andy: And I kind of have to say, I had that fear when I was your age. And looking back, that was a dumb fear.
Andy: You might not really think about it, but funnily enough, more dinosaurs are discovered and named every year now than they were in the past.
Andy: It’s kind of speeding up a bit as we get more proficient at this whole process.
Andy: And you kind of have to think about it this way. There’s a lot more of the past than there is of the present.
Andy: So there’s a lot of material to go through.
Andy: If you just look outside, in your modern day neighborhoods and environments, wherever you’re living, you can probably see and hear all sorts of different animals.
Andy: All sorts of different mammals, birds, insects, all going around. And that’s only one moment in time.
Andy: This formation covers a span of tens of millions of years. Well, millions of years at least.
Andy: So that’s a lot of different snapshots.
Andy: So tons of room for different animals to be. And, you know, maybe we can start covering some of that menagerie.

Andy: So, disclaimer, a lot of these guys we’re going to list are hadrosaurs.
Andy: And there’s sort of a good reason for that. There’s one, preservational bias. These are big, sturdy animals. They’re going to preserve better.
Andy: But the other preservational bias is they were very successful animals.
Andy: Which means they bred easily and proliferated and diversified.
Andy: Which means there’s a lot of them to work with.
Andy: As exciting as it is to find a new specimen of a new dinosaur, if you’ve only got the one, it’s kind of hard to do, you know, environmental science, understand it as an animal.
Andy: But with hadrosaurs, there’s just, there’s a whole heck of a lot of them.
Andy: We’ve got a great understanding of these fellas.
Andy: Such a great understanding that I think I’ll have a new hypothesis for you later, Bryce, about why they are the way they are.

Bryce: Ooh, I’m excited to hear it.

Andy: Well, I may have just dug myself a hole. Which I’m good at as a paleontologist.

Bryce: It’s true.

Andy: Be careful you don’t get fossilized in it.
Andy: I was really hoping you would, like, call back to the beginning of this episode with your badum tish and do, like, a high energy one. But I see I’m expecting too much of you.

Bryce: I gotta keep you on your toes.

Andy: With the hadrosaurs, there’s some fun ones. I’m partial to Grypasaurus in the earlier bits of the two med. Fellow with a big ol’ nose. Its name means hooked-nosed lizard.
Andy: Bryce, of course, partial to Acristavus. Whether or not that’s true or not is irrelevant, but he says it a lot.

Bryce: It is true, actually. Well, yeah. You like had- well, we all like dinosaurs. If it’s a dinosaur, we like it.

Bryce: Oh, you also just guessed right, because my favorite tribe of hadrosaurs are gonna be the Braculovasaurians, and that’s one of them.

Andy: That one wasn’t a guess, Bryce. I know your favorite tribe.
Andy: This is, dear listeners, Bryce will love to tell you about the tribes of the hadrosaurs.
Andy: It’s usually fun, but when it’s like, hey, I’m trying to take a shower, could you step out? And he’s like, well, but Andy, the tribes.
Andy: Andy, how could you possibly clean your body if you haven’t cleaned your mind with knowledge of the tribes?

Bryce: So, within the family of the duckbills, Hagrosauridae, there are two main subfamilies.
Bryce: There are the Lambiosaurians.
Bryce: Those are gonna be the ones like Parasaurolophus or Curithosaurus, who have the great big crests on their head that were hollow, which they could put air through to help modify some sounds they could make.
Bryce: There are also the Saurolophines, which are gonna be the ones more like Grypasaurus, like Andy was talking about, or Acrystavus.
Bryce: Those guys generally had either a small, kind of like bony crest on their head, usually kind of lumpy.
Bryce: And Grypasaurus, in the case, is like right above the nose.
Bryce: Acrystavus is special because, as his name means, the crestless grandfather.
Bryce: He’s actually one of only two currently known varieties of Hadrosaur that had absolutely no bony crest whatsoever.
Bryce: The guys who have no bony crests are also within Saurolophene.

Andy: Before I learned who was named that because he’s a very ancestral Hadrosaur, I thought it was called the non-crested grandfather or crestless grandfather.
Andy: Because if you look at, like, the skull and then reconstruct the skin on it, he’s got very, like, sullen cheeks and a defined brow.
Andy: And I was just like, yeah, he looks like a grandpa.

Bryce: Honestly, I hadn’t thought about that before you mentioned it, but, like, a year or so ago. But I kind of agree, to be honest.
Bryce: It’s pretty accurate.

Andy: I mean, just because I’m… It’s one of those things of I may be right, but it makes way more sense the way they chose to name it.
Andy: And this is why I’m not in charge of naming things.

Bryce: So, Andy, if you’re going to name a dinosaur, what do you name it?

Andy: Ugh. You can’t mind, this would be a particularly large dinosaur. Maybe within Hadrosauridae, perhaps.

Bryce: Well, Bryce, my plan is to put together two Grypasaur skeletons and make a really long one. And call it a Grypasaur.

Bryce: Oh, like the Dunsparce. Are you going to give it, like, the extra limbs, too?

Andy: Yeah. Exactly the Dunsparce.

Bryce: Oh, Andy, is there going to be a three-segment variation of Grypasaurus, too, where he has, like, an extra Grypasaur on the end?

Andy: Oh, dude. Well, then you could argue it’s, like, a different species of the genus. Like, the two-ensis or the three-ensis.
Andy: Dear audience, I’ve said something silly. Ensis means from, so I shouldn’t have said two-ensis or three-ensis. That was the only issue with what I’ve said.

Bryce: Yeah.
Bryce: Though, I guess if you wanted to be really cheeky, you could say that they’re from the two-river, the two-medicine river, or the three-medicine river.
Bryce: Yeah. If you want to be weird. But, um, tish.

Andy: Where’s your high energy? You can’t get on others and then not bring the energy to yourselves.

Bryce: I’ve been broken down.

Andy: Oh, sorry to hear that.

Bryce: That’s fine. This guy’s broken down ensis.

Andy: Yeah, I’m from the broken down area.

Bryce: I mean, some people do say that about Chicago.

Andy: Walked into that one.
Andy: Yeah, so the new two-medicine formation has been broken up into four different members.
Andy: The lowest member, the first one in the formation, is called the Rock City member.
Andy: Believe it or not, you can see that near Rock City, Montana.
Andy: As I said, oftentimes formations, members, with names from, you know, little towns nearby where you can see them pretty easily.
Andy: The Rock City member doesn’t really have much fossils going on in it, which is kind of odd.
Andy: Basically, no fossils are being found there.
Andy: So, we don’t have too much of an idea about what was living there at the time.

Bryce: And what would you put the age range as?

Andy: Oh, the age range of the Rock City member goes from about 82.5 million years ago to about 80.5 million years ago, give or take.
Andy: It’s around for about 2 million years and not much known about what’s going on there.
Andy: The next kind of formation above that, or the next member above that, is the Shield’s Crossing member.
Andy: Shield’s Crossing member actually is starting to see some fossils.
Andy: You know, we can see some, like, invertebrates.
Andy: We do start to see some dinosaur fossils. We see some hadrosaur vertebrae.
Andy: The problem is we don’t really see anything that’s determinant. We can’t really tell much of what it is.
Andy: This one kind of only lasts for about a million years. It goes from about 80.5 to, you know, a bit less than 80 million years ago. 79.8.
Andy: I believe there’s some microfossils coming out of it, but hard to determine.
Andy: Nothing super exciting. Some, you know, invertebrates.

Andy: I mean, if you’re an invertebrate paleontologist, you probably would be more excited about it.

Bryce: Or not.

Andy: I think there’s some mammal microfossils, like teeth. Maybe.
Andy: I’m not a big expert on the Shield’s Crossing member.
Andy: But there are some dinosaurs there. But nothing super, nothing that we’re able to tell exactly what species it is.
Andy: We do know there are hadrosaurs there. Hadrosaurs, of course, very common in the two medicine formation.

Andy: The next one above that, we have the Hagen’s Crossing member.
Andy: The Hagen’s Crossing member goes from about 80 million years ago to about 77 million years ago.
Andy: And in there, we actually start to see quite a bit of stuff that we can actually, you know, figure out what it is.
Andy: And we’re seeing a lot of stuff. Hadrosaurs, non-hadrosaurs.
Andy: First, let’s talk about the hadrosaurs. I’m going to hand that off, of course, to our hadrosaur expert here, Bryce.

Bryce: So the oldest one found in this formation and also just one of the oldest true hadrosaurs, well, derived guys from, so from a eohadrosaure, that exists as going to be our fellow, a Christophus.
Bryce: The Christophus’ grandfather talked about a little bit earlier.
Bryce: He’s pretty rare.
Bryce: They’ve only found one up in Montana, though they have found a second one down in Utah. So from roughly the same time period in the Waui formation.
Bryce: So that’s kind of remarkable just in the sense that usually, at least on the terms of like individual species, there aren’t very many animals that have been found contemporaneously or at the same time living in the northern and southern half of Laramedia, that western continent that was divided by the seaway.
Bryce: The divide between north and south is, people kind of go back and forth on, but it’s usually considered to be around northern Utah slash northern Colorado.

Bryce: Aside from that fella, we also get quite a bit of Gryposaurus.
Bryce: So Gryposaurus is going to make up one of the two most common hadrosaurs that we end up finding in the two medicine, at least in terms of hadrosaurs.
Bryce: This is more specifically Gryposaurus bodidens.
Bryce: The hook-nosed lizard, we also get some indeterminate Gryposaurus.
Bryce: So once they can be put down to the same genus or the first part of that name, Gryposaurus, but lack certain characteristics, they would allow them to be actually grouped in with the same species as a whole of Gryposaurus bodidens.
Bryce: So related, but maybe not the same. Maybe they are the same. Hard to say.

Bryce: Getting towards the upper portion of that member, we start to see Myasaua.
Bryce: That is going to be the other most common hadrosaura we end up seeing in this formation.
Bryce: Myasaua is the good mother lizard. And that’s the one that was found out originally at Egg Mountain.
Bryce: It had the wonderful nesting sites with all the different animals scattered around in that massive bone bed.
Bryce: That’s kind of what led us to having that initial discovery in the late 70s that Andy was talking about earlier, where that resulted in people looking at them more like animals, researching how they lived, seeing that they had parental care, stuff like that along those lines.
Bryce: That’s going to be it for the hadrosaurus from this member.
Bryce: But there are still a host of other ones that have been found, so I’m going to pass it off to Andy.

Andy: Currently, it’s finally been named.
Andy: This has got a Pachycephalosaurid, which is very exciting.
Andy: Work done by Kerry Woodruff and crew have named the unknown Pachycephalosaurid.
Andy: So these are the guys with the big old bony heads.
Andy: This is Brontotholus harmoni.
Andy: So this is very exciting because it’s a whole new, well, when I say new, confirmed type of dinosaur, it’s still old, just to clarify.

Andy: Then we have a unknown Dromaeosaurid.
Andy: So Dromaeosaurs, that’s the scientific name for raptors.
Andy: There is a small creature, a Leptoceratopsian.
Andy: So these are relatives of the Ceratopsians, like Triceratops and Sterakosaurus.
Andy: But they’re actually light enough that they could have moved on two legs or four, whereas their bigger relatives weren’t pulling that off.
Andy: And in Hagen’s Cross, that’s going to be Ceracinops.
Andy: This is a relatively small dinosaur.

Bryce: Yeah, this fella’s roughly going to be about eight and a half feet long. I guess long enough, but small compared to what we’re finding.

Andy: Now, for the unknown Dromaeosaur, it’s either Dromaeosaurus or Saurornithelestes.
Andy: We’re not entirely sure, but these guys were very similar to Velociraptor, who, fun fact, is not an American dinosaur. It’s from Mongolia.

Brett: What? So Jurassic Park isn’t very realistic?

Andy: Yes and no.
Andy: There are some great things about Jurassic Park, but no, raptors weren’t big or found.
Andy: Well, Velociraptors weren’t big. Velociraptors weren’t found in Montana.
Andy: And also, you know, they have a chewing Brachiosaurus at one point.
Andy: And it’s like, how is it chewing?

Brett: Next thing you know, you’re going to tell me that Snakewater, Montana is not even a real place.

Bryce: Not yet. It’s not.

Brett: You tell me it’s not? Oh, no.
Brett: What? Where have I been getting all my Snakewater?

Brett: Yeah.
Brett: So the next member we have is the Flag Mute member.
Brett: This one goes from about 77-ish million years ago to about 74.75 million years ago.
Brett: It’s by far the biggest member in the formation.
Brett: That’s the one that our current dig site, the Graveyard, is at.
Brett: And that’s where we’re doing all of our field work right now.
Brett: And it’s the biggest and it has the most types of dinosaurs in it.
Brett: Of course, most commonly we have the Hadrosaurus.
Brett: So, Bryce, why don’t you tell us about those?

Bryce: Now, while Hadrosaurus are the most abundant by number here, they are not actually, they are not that abundant by species type.
Bryce: So there’s less for me to go over.
Bryce: We have Pro-Saurolophus.
Bryce: So Pro-Saurolophus is going to be a Saurolophene Hadrosaur.
Bryce: So not a very large crust, kind of like the ones I was talking about before in the Hangus Crossing number.
Bryce: Those are all also Saurolophene.
Bryce: However, this guy, Pro-Saurolophus, has a bigger crust than most.
Bryce: It’s this kind of finger-like projection kind of going towards the back of the head.
Bryce: Pro-Saurolophus means before lizard crust. In reference to another guy called Saurolophus.
Bryce: Not to be confused with Parasaurolophus or other similarly named fellows. Sometimes that kind of happens in paleontology.

Bryce: To give a better picture of what that one looks like, if you guys have watched The Land Before Time, you remember Ducky.
Bryce: Ducky is a little Saurolophus.
Bryce: So Pro-Saurolophus is kind of like her, but a little bit different in the crust placement.

Bryce: We also get Hypakrasaurus, the second tallest lizard, or the second highest lizard, I think, technically.
Bryce: That was also named by Barnum Brown.
Bryce: If you recall, he discovered T-Rex.
Bryce: This was the second tallest fellow that he had discovered to T-Rex.
Bryce: Now, that name isn’t super accurate in the sense that T-Rex is not…
Bryce: Hypakrasaurus is nowhere near the second tallest lizard, and, well…
Bryce: T-Rex is nowhere near the tallest either.
Bryce: So, but that is his name.

Bryce: Hypakrasaurus is also going to be a Lambiosaurine hadrosaur, though.
Bryce: So it does have a big old crest.
Bryce: Its crest, however, is kind of like a disc-shaped, almost like a frisbee.
Bryce: It looks very similar to Carithosaurus, if you guys have seen that guy before.

Bryce: And the last fella, it’s kind of questionable if he’s a Hydrosaur or not.
Bryce: He’s a guy called Glishades, or the, uh, or, I guess, sorry, Glishades. The money devil.

Andy: Yes, I was going to correct you.

Bryce: I always like to kind of combine that together because it sounds nicer, but it’s wrong.
Bryce: Yeah.
Bryce: So, the reason that one’s named that, I love this story.
Bryce: It’s a very complex name.
Bryce: Hades, the Greek god of the underworld, had a helm of shadows which rendered him invisible.
Bryce: So, if something couldn’t be found, something was hidden, you would say Hades spirited it away.
Bryce: Glish means mud. This was hidden in mud.
Bryce: It’s a very complicated way to say hidden in mud.
Bryce: Tells a fun story, though.

Bryce: It is.
Bryce: Now, aside from being hidden in mud, Hades virile might have spirited away a lot of it because there’s not much.
Bryce: We only have a little bit of its premaxilla, so the front of its upper jaw.
Bryce: From that, we can tell that it’s Hydrosaur-like.
Bryce: There has been a debate. There are two main camps.
Bryce: You either, so basically, either this element is diagnostic enough to make it its own animal, in which case it is considered to be a late-surviving Hydrosaur-oid.
Bryce: So, whenever you have an animal that has OID at the end, it’s kind of like that, but not.
Bryce: So, the Hydrosaurs come from this group called Hydrosaur-oidia, but not every member of Hydrosaur-oidia meets the qualifications to be a Hydrosaur.
Bryce: Distinction there.

Bryce: However, if it’s not diagnostic, people consider it most likely to be an indeterminate juvenile Saurolophene Hydrosaur, in which case it would lose its name and just be a random indeterminate Hydrosaur.
Bryce: We’ll see how that goes in later years and if they ever find more of it.
Bryce: But that’s going to wrap up our Hydrosaurs and Hydrosaur-adjacent guys.
Bryce: Now, there’s a lot more non-Hagrosaurs, so I’m going to pass it back to Andy.

Andy: Alrighty, so this is where we’re going to get a lot of our Ceratopsians.
Andy: So, there’s a lot of those fellas. They’re our horn-faced friends.
Andy: This is where we’re getting Starachosaurus, Inosaurus, which has a forward and downward-curving horn.
Andy: And this behooves none of you, audience. I just, every time I say that, I do a hand motion.
Andy: None of y’all can see it, but I was doing it.
Andy: Anyways, Achillosaurus, a fellow with things called bosses, short for embossments, where instead of a protrusion of a horn, they have basically bricks of bone.
Andy: Another fun name invoking Greek mythology. Achillosaurus is named after Achillos, god of the Achillos River.
Andy: In a fight with Heracles, he turned into a bull and tried to gore Herc, but Herc ripped his horns off, and it looks like somebody ripped Achillosaurus’s horns off.
Andy: So, it’s a fun name.

Andy: There’s also some maybe ones, or just maybe Sterakosaurus again.
Andy: There’s a fella called Brachyceratops, who’s only been found as juveniles.
Andy: So, you know, there’s heated debate on if Brachyceratops is its own thing, or if it’s a juvenile Inasaurus or a juvenile Sterakosaurus.
Andy: Anyone who swears it’s an Inasaurus will give me their conclusive evidence, and then anyone who swears it’s a Sterakosaurus will give me their conclusive evidence, and I’m starting to think that they might have just had very similar looking children.
Andy: Ceratopsians changed a lot as they grew.

Andy: And then another Leptoceratopsian, this one is Prinoceratops.
Andy: It’s like, it’s similar to Cerocynops, but about half the size.

Andy: Then we get into the, uh, the, my favorite types of dinosaurs.
Andy: Price has his Haggisaurus. I love Ankylosaurians, the armored fellas.
Andy: So this is where we’re going to get Edmontonia, a, uh, fella who doesn’t have a club tail, like his, uh, namesake Ankylosaurus, the Ankylosaurians are named after.
Andy: But it’s got large protruding shoulder spikes and armor all on its back.
Andy: And then Skolosaurus, a fella with a club tail that’s pretty barrel built.
Andy: A, it’s a low to the ground armored fat boy. And I love him.

Andy: Uh, additionally, Brett has referred to Skolosaurus as the Bowser of our formation.

Brett: That wasn’t me who referred to it as that. That was a kid.
Brett: He asked me if it was, and I said, sir, why not?

Andy: I mean, you say that, but you’re the one who told me the story.

Brett: Because I was in the museum. It was a funny story.

Andy: Yeah. But as far as I’m aware, you could have been the kid.

Brett: Well, no, the kid was like eight.

Andy: So you say.

Bryce: Bryce was there.

Andy: I don’t trust his word. Verify for me.

Bryce: Uh, the kid was eight.
Bryce: Yeah. He was, the kid is the one who said it. Not, not me.
Bryce: I didn’t make this up randomly.

Brett: Yeah. No, that was a child statement.

Andy: Uh, there’s also a fella named Troodon. God, these ones are a mess.
Andy: Um, okay. Each species of Troodontid is definitely a species, but the, like the grouping is what we call a waste bin taxon, which is where you throw a bunch of things in a waste bin and you say, I’ll figure out how they’re related later.
Andy: Currently, Troodontid is a valid group. We’ll see how long that lasts.
Andy: But we do have Troodon and plenty of Troodon eggs.

Andy: We got Displetosaurus, predecessor. It’s before T-Rex. It’s a relative of T-Rex. It looks like a skinny T-Rex.
Andy: And that’s our museum’s mascot, Rusty the Displetosaurus.

Bryce: Fun fact about him.
Bryce: Uh, he’s actually been found in both members. So he’s been, uh, he’s been around in the air for a hot minute, albeit it was likely a different species.

Brett: Yeah, there’s a couple species of Displetosaurus.

Andy: Oh, there’s also Bambiraptor. This one’s fun.
Andy: I mean, they’re all fun. Uh, they’re dinosaurs, so it’s a baseline pretty cool.
Andy: But Bambiraptor’s neat because it’s a instance of articulation in the two medicine formation.

Andy: So articulation is where something has a semblance of a life posture when it’s preserved.
Andy: You get a lot of great articulation in, like, lake deposits where all the fish bones are there.
Andy: And you can even get, like, impressions of the fish.
Andy: And you look at it and you’re like, yep, that’s a fish.

Andy: I’m sure you could tell by us saying the fossils are broken a lot. We don’t get a lot of articulation.
Andy: So the Bambiraptor being, like, moderately articulated is phenomenal.
Andy: It’s another small raptor.

Andy: And then Orodromeus.
Andy: This is a fella that’s gonna be more so related to our hadrosaurs, despite people thinking it’s gonna be a raptor because it’s a bipedal running fella.
Andy: And this was also considered to be a Troodontid at one point. I told you this grouping is a mess.
Andy: But it’s a fun fella. We’ve even got plenty of eggs.
Andy: Well, more eggs of it than some other species.
Andy: Okay, 19 eggs, but that’s more eggs than I have.
Andy: And some of those have fossilized embryo in them. So that’s exciting.

Bryce: Yeah. He’s also pretty closely related to a fella called Eryctodromius, which is the only currently known burrowing dinosaur.
Bryce: So that’s pretty fun.

Bryce: How do we know that it’s a burrowing dinosaur?
Bryce: Well, because it was actually found within a, well, its own burrow.
Bryce: Burrows can be fossilized as well, albeit they’re called trace fossils.
Bryce: So trace fossils are pretty much evidence that an animal, like an animal, wow.
Bryce: Trace fossils are evidence of an animal’s behavior without the actual animal being there.
Bryce: So the only real way we can say that an animal was burrowing is if we found it within its own burrow, like we did with Eryctodromius.

Bryce: The area where Eryctodromius has been found, there are burrows around, but we’ve never found anybody in them.
Bryce: So it’s possible, and he still has those burrowing adaptations or digging adaptations for his front limbs.
Bryce: It’s possible Eryctodromius might also be a burrowing dinosaur, but we have not found anything that really nails that down.

Andy: And then I want to clarify when Bryce says we, if, about finding stuff, us three, the lads, will talk about we being paleontologists as a whole.
Andy: We, unfortunately, the lads, don’t have Eryctodromius or Eryctodromius burrows at our dig site as much as I would love it.

Bryce: Nah, that research is mainly being done by the Museum of the Rockies.
Bryce: We’re working in a riverbed. There’s no burrows in a river.

Andy: Well, there are burrows. It’s just not from the dinosaurs.

Bryce: Yeah, not from dinosaurs.
Bryce: I was about to say, Brad.

Andy: They’re big burrows, yeah.
Andy: We get small burrows all the time, actually, like from worms and such.

Andy: So there’s actually a secret dinosaur that Andy and Bryce won’t tell you about that you can find in the Two Medicine Formation, maybe.

Bryce: Yeah, so there’s another dinosaur in this formation called Ricardo Estia.
Bryce: Ricardo Estia is a kind of interesting dinosaur. It’s maybe not a real species, probably.
Bryce: It’s only known from teeth. So that already is kind of dubious for dinosaurs.
Bryce: Mammals tend to have very distinctive teeth. Dinosaurs tend not to.
Bryce: So to only be known from teeth as a dinosaur means it’s already kind of dubious.
Bryce: It’s also known from Montana, New Mexico, and Kazakhstan. You know, very nearby places.
Bryce: So probably not all the same guy.
Bryce: But it’s a little dromaeosaur, a little raptor. So it’s kind of a fake dinosaur, but it’s here, whatever it is.

Brett: So one other kind of dinosaur that’s kind of newly discovered just last year in the Two Medicine Formation is there’s actually a new species of Teratophonia dinosaur.
Brett: So these are a group of tyrannosaurs.
Brett: But previously, before this one being found, have actually only been found in southern Laramidia, typically in Mexico or like New Mexico, Arizona.
Brett: So very far south.

Bryce: A little bit of Utah, too.

Brett: Yeah.
Brett: So the fact that one has been found in Montana is actually pretty exciting.
Brett: The other kind of exciting thing is that it shares its range with a spleenosaurus.
Brett: It’s typically not common that you see two large tyrannosaurs in the same area as one another because they’d often, you know, compete with each other and everything.
Brett: One would just move into a different spot.
Brett: So they’re probably eating different stuff, hunting different types of animals.
Brett: There’s so much here that they’re able to live in the same areas at the same times.
Brett: Or maybe we just have intersecting migratory routes here, you know, and these aren’t actually here at the same times of year.
Brett: But in the fossil record, of course, there’s no way to ever know that.

Andy: But to clarify, there’s some ways to know it with much more modern stuff.

Bryce: Yeah.
Bryce: We ain’t working with modern stuff.

Brett: No, but like ground sloths, you can track what time of year they ate certain things based off of the pollen in their poop.

Bryce: Cool.
Bryce: I didn’t know that.

Bryce: Technically, you can track migratory paths with chemical compounds from food and teeth as well.
Bryce: They did it like my advisor for my master’s degree. She did that with sauropods.
Bryce: So you can still kind of do it. It’s just much harder.

Andy: So Bryce, if you had the choice between tracking it via sauropod teeth or ground sloth poop, what would you choose?

Bryce: Hmm. Probably the poop.
Bryce: I’m not gonna lie.

Andy: I thought you were gonna say the sauropod teeth.

Bryce: Yeah, but like there’s the fun tied like modern stuff because like the whole thing with avocados almost going extinct because of the death of the giant ground sloth because the giant ground sloth was the thing that primarily consumed them and then spread the seeds around.
Bryce: It’s kind of a cool idea.

Bryce: The reason we have guacamole is because of ground sloth, Don. It’s great.

Andy: Yeah.

Bryce: And early farmers. Don’t forget about them.

Andy: All right.

Bryce: But that’s not a funny story. It was mainly the ground sloths. They’re the ones who kept it alive after the ground sloths went extinct.

Brett: Yeah. Wait, the ground sloths went extinct? When were you going to tell me this?

Andy: Well, the giant ground sloths.

Bryce: Yeah.

Brett: I mean, some people believe that they still are alive out there in the Amazon rainforest.

Andy: Yeah. And I’m sure when I made that joke about hadrosaurs being mononongal, some people would believe that too.

Bryce: I mean, like it’s actually like a fairly common like cryptozoologic belief.
Bryce: You know, if you’re big in the cryptozoology communities, like you’ve heard that one.

Andy: Maybe the giant ground sloths were a monogongal as well.

Bryce: Maybe the giant ground sloths were the friends we made along the way.

Brett: Maybe.

Andy: You know what sucks about the two medicine formation?

Brett: What?

Andy: Giant ground sloths hadn’t evolved yet, so we don’t have any of them.

Bryce: That you know of.

Andy: Yeah, that’s true.
Andy: We do find mammals in the two medicine formation.
Andy: Such as Elphidon, which is a kind of like a marsupial rat, like a possum rat.
Andy: They’re cute. I like them.

Andy: And then I have to make sure to say it right. Semioxes.
Andy: I think that’s right. It’s a multi-tuberculate.
Andy: Which the best way to describe them are they were rodents before rodents were rodents.
Andy: They’re kind of related, but they did the same thing.
Andy: They just had weird, different teeth.

Andy: And there’s other stuff in the two medicine formation that aren’t dinosaurs.
Andy: Fellas like Montanaz Darko is a pterosaur.
Andy: A relative of dinosaurs, sure. But not a dinosaur.
Andy: More recently discovered Pitski, a smaller pterosaur.
Andy: There’s also champsosaurs, which are crocodilomorphs. Basically, animals like crocodiles.

Bryce: If you saw one, you might think it’s a crocodile. They’re kind of like crocodiles, except they’re a bit smaller.
Bryce: Their mouths are much narrower. Eating fish, primarily.

Andy: It’s one of those things that they’re related to. Close to a garyle, I guess.
Andy: They’re distantly related to crocodiles. They look like crocodiles. They aren’t crocodiles.
Andy: There’s a lot of those in the Foster record.

Bryce: The crocodilomorphs and the pseudo-crocodilians, they are numerous.

Andy: There’s this fun thing called convergent evolution, where two not necessarily related animals, or organisms, plants can do it, evolve a similar feature, because it’s a good feature. Why reinvent the wheel?

Andy: But what’s really annoying is when closely related things have convergent evolution.
Andy: It’s like, why can’t this be an ancestral trait? Make it too easy.

Bryce: Yeah, it really would.

Brett: Where’s the fun in that? It’s not science if you don’t hate it at some point.

Andy: The quote from Charles Darwin, where he had spent years of his life trying to prove evolution with barnacles, before realizing those were the worst thing to try to use it with.
Andy: The quote, I hate a barnacle as no man has ever hated one before.
Andy: And that’s how you know that man knew what he was talking about with barnacles.

Bryce: That always reminds me of the onion video with the anteater expert.

Andy: That’s so great.

Bryce: That one was good.

Andy: And what does the name mean? It means eater of ants.

Andy: So other dinosaurs.
Andy: There’s actually another dinosaur that we haven’t really mentioned yet, because we don’t really know too much about it.
Andy: It’s actually a new one that we’re currently working on from our dig site.
Andy: It is a hadrosaur, of course, but it’s never been seen in our formation before.
Andy: So we’re currently kind of studying it to figure out a little bit more about it, and we’re hoping to get published on it sometime in the next year.

Bryce: Yes.
Bryce: It’s very exciting stuff.
Bryce: Our site actually has quite a lot of interesting things with haggers going on.
Bryce: Not only is it a multitexonomic site, it’s a multitexonomic site that has several different haggersaur species all living together, which is interesting.

Andy: All dying together, at least.

Bryce: Yeah, I mean, they were there at one point, maybe. At least, temporaneously.

Brett: Well, I guess we don’t know. We’ll have a better idea on exactly the timing of our site.
Brett: We’re actually working right now to get our site dated, so we’ll actually have that soon.
Brett: We’ll have an idea of eventually if these were living together all at once. Hopefully.

Bryce: That’d be neat.

Brett: It would be. It’s kind of like us, how we all live together.

Andy: And we’ll die together. That’s how it’s going to happen.

Bryce: Yes. Much like the graveyard.
Bryce: Bryce and I will die in a river.
Bryce: And then have our bones be scattered everywhere so you can’t tell whose is who.

Andy: Yeah. I paid a fortune teller to tell me what my future entailed, and she told me that.
Andy: And, you know, I thought it was a vague riddle, but now I’m starting to realize what she meant.

Andy: And could you change your name to something that starts with a B so we can all start with B when we’re dead together?

Bryce: PR, even.
Bryce: It’s not like the dinosaurs have that.

Andy: Like, you can change your name to Brandy.
Andy: The sailors are Brandy.
Andy: You know, if I will. I forget the lyrics.

Bryce: I don’t even know what song you’re talking about.

Andy: Yeah. Did it get cut out?

Bryce: No.

Andy: I mean, it was kind of just like mumbled.

Bryce: Yeah, because I forgot the lyrics.

Andy: Oh, okay. That makes sense.

Brett: Yeah, but if people are interested in learning more about our dig site, I mean, you can always come out to our dig site and see it in person and get a chance to dig and work there.

Bryce: Yeah.
Bryce: Sign up for the scientific process.

Andy: Yeah. You can work on help uncover real dinosaurs.

Bryce: You can also see us prep fossils and then, like, cheer and clap for us. That helps us, too.

Andy: At our museum.

Bryce: Yes.

Andy: Oh, yeah, I should have clarified. It’s not just, like, at my house.
Andy: I mean, you could cheer and clap from home as well. Maybe the good vibes will get to us.

Bryce: And if you want to send your good vibrations to our museum, we’re located in Bynum, Montana.

Bryce: See? Even Bynum starts with a B. You gotta get your name changed, Andy.

Andy: Our museum’s name doesn’t start with a B. We’re not Buh Montana Dinosaur Center.

Bryce: Not yet. Soon. Put it to a Facebook poll.

Andy: It’s not Bumayasora. Like, not everything has to start with a B.

Bryce: Not yet. Our day is coming. Isn’t it, Bryce?

Bryce: It is. My time is nigh.

Andy: Well, I hope you guys have enjoyed this episode.
Andy: I’m still Andy for the time being.

Brett: I’m Brett.

Bryce: I’m probably Bryce still.

Andy: And have a good one.