Museum of the Rockies

The tyrannosaur standing outside the front door, nicknamed Big Mike, is a bronze. It was cast in 2001 from a skeleton found in 1988 by Kathy Wankel, a rancher from Angela, on a family outing at Fort Peck Reservoir, when the lake was low and she saw bone weathering out of a small island. She dug out a piece and brought it here to be identified. It was an arm of Tyrannosaurus rex, and in 1989 and 1990 crews under the museum's curator of paleontology, Jack Horner, took out 80 to 85 percent of the skeleton, skull included, which made it one of the most complete ever found.

The bones were never the museum's. They came from federal land, so they belong to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which lent them to Bozeman from 1990, and the museum prepared the skeleton and showed it here for more than two decades. In 2013 the Corps agreed to a fifty-year loan to the Smithsonian, and in April 2014 the Wankel rex was crated and shipped to the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, where it now stands as the nation's T. rex. Montana kept the bronze.

The museum is part of Montana State University, and its halls run well beyond dinosaurs. It stands on the south side of the campus in Bozeman.