Great Plains Dinosaur Museum

On July 27, 2000, a volunteer digger from Minot named Dan Stephenson noticed part of a tail and a pelvis showing in a sandstone channel in the badlands north of Malta. What the Judith River Dinosaur Institute dug out was a young Brachylophosaurus, a duck-billed dinosaur about seventy-seven million years old, lying fully articulated with fossilized skin over its body and the remains of its last meal of plants in its gut. They called it Leonardo. Guinness listed it in 2004 as the best-preserved dinosaur ever found.

For years the institute worked out of a converted auto shop in town it called the Dinosaur Field Station, and visitors paid to see Leonardo there, which kept the digging going. In 2005 the Legislature voted $500,000 toward a proper museum, and the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum opened in 2008, run by the volunteer board of the Judith River Foundation. Leonardo missed the opening. He was on loan to the Houston Museum of Natural Science, and a replica stood in.

The man who had built all this was gone by then. Nate Murphy, the self-taught paleontologist who ran the field station and had found the complete Brachylophosaurus called Elvis in 1994, resigned in July 2007, about the time state and federal investigators began looking into his collecting. In 2009 he pleaded guilty to a state theft charge over a raptor fossil taken from a private ranch, and in federal court to taking dinosaur bones from public land in the Hell Creek badlands. The museum shows Brachylophosaurus from babies to adults, Leonardo's replica, and Ralph, the first Camarasaurus found in Montana; Elvis is next door at the Phillips County Museum. The original Leonardo, by the museum's account, is on loan to the Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum in Japan.