Carter County Museum and Dino Shindig

On North Main Street in Ekalaka, a ranching town of about 400 in the Russell Creek Valley of southeast Montana, the Carter County Museum occupies a former automotive garage. Its walls are built of stones gathered from deteriorating homesteads and chunks of petrified wood from local ranches. Admission is free, and there is a bike rack by the main door.

The Lambert Room and the garage on Main

The paleontology displays fill the Lambert Room. Its centerpiece is a mounted Edmontosaurus annectens, which the Montana Dinosaur Trail describes as one of only a few nearly complete skeletons of the species. The trail also calls this giant hadrosaur one of about five such specimens found in the United States. It and the two hadrosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History in New York were all found approximately 30 miles west of Ekalaka. Nearby are a complete Triceratops skull, a mounted T. rex, and mounts and casts of pachycephalosaurus, mosasaur, and a pterosaur. The trail notes that the pterosaur is the only known specimen from the Hell Creek Formation. The surrounding badlands have also produced plesiosaurs, ankylosaurs, and what the trail calls the most complete juvenile T. rex. A 2017 account found the usual county-museum saddles and antique rifles sharing the building with a replica T. rex crouching at eye level.

The museum says its exhibits span 100 million years. They begin with creatures of the Western Interior Seaway and run through the extinction at the K-Pg boundary of the Hell Creek Formation, then to Ice Age hunting by paleoindians. Artifacts come from the Mill Iron Site, which is 10,500 years old and one of Montana’s oldest archaeological sites. Other galleries treat the Crow, Northern Cheyenne, Mandan/Hidatsa, Lakota (Sioux), and Assiniboine nations, along with homesteading and the Civilian Conservation Corps at Camp Needmore. Local veterans are represented in displays running from the Indian Wars of the mid-1800s to Desert Storm. There are exhibits on the Tooke Bucking Horses and on Lee Castleberry Taxidermy. One family travel post singles out “the museum’s famous two-headed calf.” On a Fossil Friday in September 2026, the museum posted specimen V-78-2, a partial foot of Anzu wyliei. This crested, bird-like theropod was among the last non-avian dinosaurs in North America. Since August 10, 2026, the Schoolhouse Gallery has held American Horse Power, on the horse in North America. It includes fossils of Mesohippus and the famous Tooke horse Grey Wolf, and it is scheduled to move to Bozeman in the spring of 2027.

The staff runs the building as much for Ekalaka as for travelers. Assistant Director Marilyn Schultz was raised in the Ekalaka area, and her favorite work is the photography collection. Patrick Rouane manages the gift shop and also prepares fossils in the lab. Stew Cook grew up in town and started as a volunteer leading field camps and dealing with landowners. He is now Paleontology Field & Lab Manager, and his thesis studied amber from the Hell Creek Formation. Denise Elmore leads the monthly Sewing Soiree. The fall 2026 calendar also lists Tour de Fiber afternoons and a Carter County Geological Society lecture series on Thursday evenings from October 2026 into June 2027. “We host sewing soirees, craft workshops, a local lecture series and a book club,” said Executive Director Sabre Moore. “We do quite a bit here as a community center, not just as a museum.”

The 5,000-square-foot building can show roughly 12 percent of the collection. In May 2026, County News reported that the building was primed for a 15,000-square-foot addition that fall. The addition would bring bathrooms, a planetarium, a community room, a paleontology lab, and more exhibit space, and Curator of Paleontology Nathan Carroll hopes to show nearly 80 percent of the holdings. The county commissioners put $1 million in Payments in Lieu of Taxes toward the work. The state announced a $1.25 million grant that could grow to $2.7 million. Visitation reached 5,500 in 2025, up 300 percent since Moore took the job ten years earlier. Carroll is planning a map of every dig and the ranch it happened on. “A lot of things about whether you raise sheep or harvest barley on your ranch is in some ways kind of dictated by whether or not there’s a sea reptile or a primitive primate beneath you,” he said.

A jaw that splits watermelons

At the end of July the museum hosts the Annual Dino Shindig. The Office of Tourism and Business Development named it Montana’s Event of the Year in 2017, and the 15th is set for July 24–25, 2027. The week opens on Thursday at Medicine Rocks State Park with sunset yoga, a bat walk, and Dinosaurs & Dark Skies. In 2026 that program was led by Steve Hobe of the Adler Planetarium, with telescopes set up. Friday brings an art workshop with exhibit designer Jenn Hall Tooke in the Central Schoolhouse Gallery and a children’s science afternoon with the Museum of the Rockies.

Saturday is the main day. Paleontologists lecture inside St. Elizabeth Lutheran Church, where a silent auction runs all day, and a live auction begins at 4:30 p.m. when the talks end. The 2026 speakers included Dr. Lawrence Bradley on “Paleontological resource dispossession of the Great Sioux Nation.” Dougie Hall spoke on Good Medicine Bucking Horses, and Dr. Tim Urbaniak on horses in Montana rock art. At Prehistoric Fight Night, hosted by Rextooth Studios, scientists argue which extinct animal would win a fight. Out at the Ekalaka Track & Arena, the ranch rodeo runs a Pony Express Race, wild cow milking, branding, and the Trifecta of steer loading, range doctoring, and stray gathering. It ends with a match bronc ride on local horses of the Tooke bloodlines. In 2026 the street dance was held at the Town Triangle on Main Street, with the Billings band Fast Forward playing country and western from 6 to 10 p.m. A 2019 PBS stop recorded face painting and steaks deep-fried on pitchforks. It also recorded a hydraulic T. rex jaw that crushes watermelons.

Sunday morning, expedition members meet at the museum at 7:30 a.m., bring their own lunch and hats, and receive field assignments. The digs are on BLM, Forest Service, and private land, in latest Cretaceous exposures that yield dinosaur, mammal, marine, and plant fossils. Nothing goes home in a pocket. Every find is deposited at the museum with the finder named as collector. “We’ve got several seven-timers,” Carroll told PBS in 2019. “Some actually started off at 7, and now they’re 14, and they have their 7-year-old brother coming in with them now, too.” In 2025, an Ohio fourth grader named Elliott Fuller said what he hoped to dig up: “Maybe like, trying to find a T-rex.” Chuck Jennissen, a pediatric physician from Iowa, had come to six Shindigs by then. “I’ve loved dinosaurs since I was a little kid and never really grew up,” he said. Moore put the week’s take for Ekalaka at around $30,000. In 2026, 933 people took part over the week, 305 of them at the Saturday talks.

Five volunteers and a frozen yogurt shop

The robotic jaw was one of Nate Carroll’s high school science projects. He was ranch-raised in Ekalaka, entered Montana State University’s paleontology program in 2007, and spent the summer of 2012 at home. By then the town had lost half its population since the 1960s. That fall he went back to Bozeman and recruited students to spend the next summer reviving the museum. One of them was Sabre Moore, from Wright, Wyoming, who was finishing a history degree. “And,” she said, “I absolutely fell in love with Ekalaka.”

Before leaving Bozeman in 2013, the group of five met at a frozen yogurt shop to plan the first Shindig. They wanted to bring locals together with the paleontology field crews working nearby, plus perhaps a few visitors from Billings or Bozeman. They planned kids’ activities, lectures, a Saturday-night dance, and a field day prospecting for fossils. A state tourism grant paid for advertising, and a film student among them made a television commercial. About 300 people came. “We doubled the population of the town, basically,” Moore said. She was hired as full-time director in 2016. By County News’s account, she and Carroll are married, and Carroll is now curator.

The 2016 speakers were headed by Kirk Johnson, director of the Smithsonian’s natural history museum. Afterward, state tourism officials picked the Shindig over the 4,000-participant Run to the Pub in Bozeman. At the fifth Shindig in July 2017, more than 400 people came, from as far as Oregon, Texas, and Virginia. Sculptor Doyle Trankina worked on a demonstration piece, and Llane Carroll explained the jaw to onlookers. A rancher pulled a lever on hydraulic lines running to a skid-steer, and cast metal teeth sliced a watermelon in two. “Ekalaka is a wonderful place to speak about paleontology,” said John Scannella of the Museum of the Rockies. Moore later gave the reason for the event: “The big thing with the Shindig was to make sure that all these discoveries that are happening in Ekalaka actually come back and people hear about them, learn where their dinosaurs went, [and] learn what they’ve been hearing about.”

A vault door from the courthouse

The Carter County Geological Society founded the museum in 1936 to collect, preserve, and catalog what the surrounding country turned up. It was the first county museum in Montana, and the museum says it was the first to display dinosaur fossils in the state. The museum credits founder and first director Walter Peck, who as a state senator helped pass the law that set up the legal and tax structure for county museums. County News tells it as two Carter County legislators who had watched fossils leave for museums in Chicago and New York. The arrangement survives. The county owns the building and employs the staff, and the society owns the collections, the gift shop, and the events. Moore reports to both bodies every month.

The first museum was in the high school. The Talking Trail account says that after nearly forty years it was bursting at the seams. In 1975 Marshall Lambert, a newly retired teacher, began making the old stone garage into a museum. He bought a large safe and a vault door at an auction at a neighboring courthouse to give the specimens fireproof storage. Freezing temperatures and dwindling funds slowed the work, and it was finished as a community effort in 1984. The museum’s own history dates the move to the late 1970s. The building marks its 100th year in 2026, and the museum its 90th.

County Commissioner Pamela Castleberry described what came before: “We have people in this community who kept triceratops skulls in their living rooms because there wasn’t anywhere to put things.” Each visit, she said, she marvels at someone’s contribution, “whether they found fossils or worked in the museum when it was in the high school basement, or helped build the current museum.”