Great Plains Dinosaur Museum digs

Roberta lies in the plaster cast that carried her out of the ground, a near-complete Brachylophosaurus left as the diggers found her. The museum’s exhibit text calls her posture “life position.” A 2008 newspaper account describes “her slender neck arched in a death pose.” She is one of a family of duck-billed dinosaurs at the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum & Field Station, which stands on Montana’s Highway 2 next to the Milk River and the Trafton Walking Trail. Outside are an outdoor dig pit, a picnic table and a large parking lot. Across that lot is the Phillips County Museum, with exhibits on cowboys and outlaws, Native Americans and pioneer life, and, as the dinosaur museum’s own page notes, another dinosaur. A 2009 photograph showed the gift shop “filled with dinosaur posters, books and figures.”

The town has been asked to explain its name. “Malta, MONTANA. Not the Mediterranean island of Malta,” the museum’s FAQ page answers, “(but in the winters we sure do wish we were there!).”

A walk through the formations

The gallery runs in geologic order, and the museum invites visitors to “walk through” the region’s ancient story. It begins with two dinosaurs from the Morrison Formation, about 150 million years old. These are among the oldest dinosaur fossils recovered from Montana. Giffen the stegosaur is the northernmost dinosaur fossil ever recovered from the Morrison Formation in North America. Ralph is the first Camarasaurus ever found in the state.

Ralph was collected in 2003 near the Little Snowy Mountains in Fergus County. His bones looked large to the people who found him, but small for a sauropod, and some features did not match a typical Camarasaurus. His finders thought he might be a new kind of sauropod. In the summer of 2015 a team of paleontologists compared his bones with every other Morrison sauropod and counted the growth rings inside them. They concluded that Ralph was a Camarasaurus that died at about 30 to 35 years of age: a small, old individual whose bones never had to carry a giant’s weight. Why Camarasaurus is so rare in Montana remains unexplained. “Maybe one day a future paleontologist will solve this riddle,” the museum writes.

The next room holds the inland sea that once covered the middle of the continent. Ammonites fill it, many of them on loan from the collection of Larry Eichhorn and his family. Among them is Didymoceras, whose shell uncoils in a loose spiral. On August 13, 2026, Eichhorn, who could not travel, joined a gathering at the museum by Zoom with his daughter Connie and toured his collection on screen while the session was recorded. Also in the sea section is a cast of Avery, a Plioplatecarpus mosasaur found near Hinsdale, given by the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, which displays the original. In Avery’s eye socket the sclerotic ring is visible, a bony structure that held the eyeball’s shape against the changing pressure of the water.

After the sea comes the Judith River Formation, a coastal delta the museum compares to the present Gulf Coast. Brachylophosaurus lived here in large herds, and the museum holds a growth series of the animal “from ‘babies’ to adults.” The final section is the Hell Creek Formation, home of Herb the Triceratops. Herb was found in the 1930s, with a head from Wyoming and parts of the body from Montana. The museum says Herb was once on display at “the Museum of Natural History” and was the first triceratops ever mounted. Some specimens elsewhere in the hall carry healed evidence of attacks by meat-eating dinosaurs.

Leonardo, named for a carving in sandstone

In 2000 the Australian paleontologist Mark Thompson was escorting a party of 12 diggers north of Malta. He told the story in 2008: “I was coming around a coulee when I heard someone shout, ‘Guys, I’ve found a dinosaur.’ 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.’”

On the hillside Thompson saw three articulated vertebrae. “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,” he said, “so we knew the rest of the animal was there.” The animal had been buried so fast that scavengers never reached it. The 2008 account says it was either killed in a mudslide or buried by one within hours of death. The discoverer, Dan Stephenson, found the name “Leonard” carved into sandstone near the fossil, along with the date 1916, and named the dinosaur Leonardo.

News of a dinosaur mummy reached Bob Bakker, paleo curator of the Houston Museum of Natural Science, while he was leading a dig in Wyoming. He came north to put the rumor to rest. “I was skeptical about Leonardo, that he was a dino mummy with plant material in his guts,” he said in 2008. “But when I came to the Field Station, I could clearly see his skin. Then I saw chewed plant material in his gut.”

More than 90 percent of Leonardo is covered with skin impressions of small, polygonal scales. The fossil also preserves a broad beak, a frill of hatchet-shaped projections along the back, and a soft-tissue “mitten” enclosing three fingers of each hand. The 2004 Guinness Book of World Records lists Leonardo as the Best Preserved Dinosaur. In 2016 researchers found traces of bristled, needle-like worms in the stomach region, and the museum’s page announces the finding plainly: “’Leonardo’ had stomach parasites!”

The fossil itself is now on loan to the Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum in Japan. The museum in Malta displays a rapid-prototyped replica made from white-light scans of the original. In the summer of 2026 Dr. Masateru Shibata and Dr. Kaito Asato of Fukui spent about two weeks around Malta, documenting fossils on the surface of land the museum had chosen, without excavating.

Leonardo came from the same ground as his relatives. In 1994 Nate Murphy found Elvis, a complete, uncrushed Brachylophosaurus. Elvis is on display at the neighboring Phillips County Museum and at the Museum of the Rockies. Roberta followed Leonardo the next year, and after her came Peanut, a juvenile with some skin impressions. Roberta was first called Bob, until the institute learned that another dinosaur already had that name and that the specimen was probably female.

Digging north of Gilford

The museum also takes visitors into the field. Its own dig page describes eastern Montana as a landscape “so quiet that the only sounds came from the wind and birds,” where the horizon stretches 100 miles. In 2026 the adult program worked for a second season at a site north of Gilford, in Hill County, with paleontologist Harris Boekenheide. It ran as a three-day dig June 24 to 26 and a five-day dig July 13 to 17. Diggers must be at least 12 years old and able to hike short distances over rough ground and to sit in the dirt. The gear list warns against canvas shoes: “there is cactus!” Lodging in Gilford is minimal, the crew splits the grocery bill, and lunch is a sandwich sack lunch. When weather closes the site, the program moves to Malta for prospecting and work on real fossils in what the museum calls its “primitive fossil prep lab.”

Younger diggers, ages 6 to 15, come with an adult for a one-day program. The group meets at the museum’s back door at 9 a.m. and drives together to a dinosaur site about 30 miles out of town. In the afternoon, back in the museum, the children finish with a treasure hunt built around a “Prehistoric Mystery.” The leader is paleo-technician Sue Frary, who has 30 years in archaeology, paleontology and museums. She was senior technician for the traveling exhibit “Jurassic Park: the Lost World” and for the first reconstruction of Argentinosaurus. Jeremiah Robinson, Director of Paleontology, leads the museum’s programs and digs. Tom Dill, a paleontology intern, joined the team in May.

The museum urges anyone considering a dig to ask whether the outfit is a museum or a commercial collector that legally sells fossils. On a museum dig, its page says, crews are often acknowledged in scientific papers, and the bones they collect end up in displays or research.

From the old Mister Tire

Before the museum there was a tire shop. In January 2003 the Havre paper found Murphy, then curator of paleontology at the Phillips County Museum and research director of the Judith River Dinosaur Institute, preparing Leonardo in the old Mister Tire in Malta. The Green family of Malta had sold the building to the institute at almost no cost. Since November, Murphy and his son Matt had been renovating it. Matt, 18, had helped his father look for and prepare fossils since he was 6. They painted the floors and walls and installed track lighting and workbenches built in the Malta High School shop. Visitors would be able to watch preparators at work and talk with them.

In that same article Murphy described a board of local residents, chosen a few weeks earlier, that would raise tax-deductible donations for a dinosaur museum in Malta. “Dinosaurs pull people, that’s a plain fact,” he said. The museum dates its governing nonprofit, the Judith River Foundation, Inc., to 2002.

The museum opened in June 2008. The state Legislature provided a $500,000 grant, and the state Department of Commerce built the 3,000-square-foot building for about $600,000. “It looks like a piece of Seattle in Montana, but it fits,” said Anne Boothe of the Phillips County Economic Growth Council. “Some people call it a windbreak and others call it a grain elevator.” Leonardo missed the opening. He had gone to Houston on a one-year loan, and the Houston museum was to send back 10 percent of its $15 admission. In the old field station only a few hundred visitors a year had seen the fossils. “This is a field station, a prep lab, but now we’re moving into a full museum,” said Frary, then the museum’s coordinator. In January 2009 the Billings Gazette described the new building as “relatively small, but it has big plans – and high ceilings.”

Volunteer board members of the Judith River Foundation govern and run the museum. It receives no general tax support and pays its way through memberships, admissions, digs, tours and fundraising. The 2026 season ended with the last weekend of September. From October through April the doors open by appointment.

In 2003, before any of it was built, Murphy put his case for the museum this way: “If you’re digging up all these wonderful specimens and nobody comes to see them, what good is it?”