Black Hills Institute of Geological Research

Stan is a T-Rex.

and we're at the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research just outside of Rapid City in Hill City.

It's also the first ever dinosaur that Rosalie has seen in the flesh or in skeletal form.

What do you think?

Okay, and us adults had a blast too.

Thanks for joining me, and if you'd like to create your own South Dakota stories, you can find out how to do so by going to TravelSouthDakota.com. You'll find lots of inspiration and ideas and everything else you need to know to plan your great South Dakota adventure.

Thank you to our guests who featured in this episode, Johnny B, Katherine Schliep Larson and the rest of the staff from Reptile Gardens, and Peter Larson and Dr Sharon Weaver from the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research.

If you enjoyed this episode, there are plenty more Travel South Dakota Stories episodes to listen to.

[gentle music] It's the summer of 1990.

A crew of fossil hunters pulled together by the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research had been searching through a ranch in South Dakota for months.

They'd found some good stuff, some Edmontosaurus bones, and were getting ready to wrap up and return to Hill City to get the artifacts ready for display.

But then their truck got a flat tire, then their spare was flat, then their pump's rubber hose was broken too, so they slowly nursed the truck from their camp to the nearby town of Faith to get it fixed.

That's how reservations work.

Therefore, he had to get approval from both the Bureau of Indian Affairs in DC and his tribe before selling anything from his land, which he hadn't.

So that meant there were now four different entities claiming they owned Sue: the Black Hills Institute, landowner Morris Williams, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, and the US federal government.

After a long and highly publicized trial, the judge ruled that the fossil was a fundamental component of the physical land that Williams didn't technically own, and therefore, it was the US government's property.

Yeah.

I, uh, so, so when that, when that project was actually open that you could talk about it, um, Pete and Sam and Adam and those dudes, they become pretty good friends at the Black Hills Institute.

And so coming over and having beers and watching that progress is amazing.

And whoever went into that winery... and said, this could be one heck of a dinosaur museum is a genius.

He's the owner of both Cohort and now the new, just a few weeks old, Fifth Street Pizza.

They're in the same original location as Cohort.

Plus, they have the cohort of the Black Hills out by the new Black Hills Institute that's being built.

That's going to be very exciting as that develops.