In 1936 the members of the Carter County Geological Society, ranchers and townspeople, founded a museum in the basement of the high school in Ekalaka to keep what the ground kept turning up. It was the first county museum in Montana and the first in the state to put dinosaur fossils on display, a distinction the museum credits to Walter Peck, one of its founders and its first director. In the late 1970s it moved into a former automotive garage on Main Street, where it still is.
The collection is still mostly the county's own. About three quarters of the paleontology came from local ranches; one find began when the curator's father, out looking for a missing bull, noticed a pile of rock that did not belong. The curator, Nathan Carroll, grew up on a ranch nearby. The Lambert Dinosaur Hall holds fossils from the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous, every one of them from the Ekalaka country, and only about an eighth of what the museum holds can be shown at any one time. Rooms beyond it carry the county's Native and homestead history.
Since 2013 the museum has hosted the Dino Shindig on the last weekend of July, when paleontologists working in the area come into town to tell the people whose land the bones come from what they have found. The state tourism office named it Montana's event of the year in 2017. Medicine Rocks State Park is a short drive north.
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