Retreading old ground: Alf Museum returns to the Big Horn Basin for Peccary Trip

Last Thursday, the Big Horn Basin Geoscience and Dinosaur Museum hosted Dr. Andrew Farke, the Director of the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology. Farke spoke as part of the group’s summer lecture series, which continues this week, and discussed at length the work he and his students are doing in the Big Horn Basin.
The primary goal of the group’s research, he explained, is to fill in gaps of knowledge about the Campanian period, which occurred roughly 83.6 to 72.1 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous Period, which ended with the extinction of dinosaurs 65.5 million years ago. What lived here? What was the environment like? Would the fossils found in the Basin be more similar to those found in the north, in Montana and Canada, or further south, in Colorado and New Mexico? And just how old are the Big Horn Basin’s rocks, really?
“We’re looking at rocks that are based on, by some dates, between 88 and 71 million years old,” Farke said at the top of his lecture. “The dinosaurs you’re probably most familiar with in Wyoming in the Cretaceous come out of the Lance Formation over in the Niobrara County and that area, so that’s where triceratops and all those things are coming out of, and we’re much older than our triceratops and we also know very, very little about it.”
Farke and his students have targeted two primary sites around the Basin. The first, located in the Worland area, revealed an estuarian environment where a freshwater ecosystem met the Western Interior Seaway, where Farke noted that, “Because [previous work] was preliminary [and] the work we’ve been doing, because we’re going through pretty methodically, we’re finding a lot that hasn’t been reported previously.”
In a preview of unpublished work, Farke revealed that his students had made several first-of-their-kind discoveries. Among them were teeth from the T. praesagus, one of the first marsupials, salamanders, frogs, and primitive birds such as the Hesperornis. The rarest was a vertebra from a champsosaurs, discovered last summer by a high school senior.
“They’ve never been reported in the Mesaverde Formation in the Big Horn Basin,” Farke told the assembly. “Even though it’s new for the area, it still shows they’re incredibly rare. If you go north, into Montana or Alberta, they’re everywhere, but for whatever reason they’re really rare in Wyoming. And if you go further south, they’re also really rare, so maybe that’s something [to do] with the southern parts of the US at that time.”
He added that the discovery of amphibians in the area was also prompting questions for further research. “It’s really weird because we have all these marine sharks, sharks living in saltwater — amphibians can’t live in saltwater. So we don’t know if they’re getting washed into the ocean or what’s happening, but it’s really weird, it’s a big puzzle. But it’s cool to have a big question that comes from our research, too.
“We’re finding a lot of the things that other people had found before, but also a lot of things that hadn’t been reported before,” he continued. “There’s dinosaurs, there’s frogs, there’s Hesperornis. It’s giving us a better picture of our world during that time, 78-76 million years ago.”
The other site that the Alf has been working on is in the Oregon Basin outside of Cody. Farke and his students first visited the site in 2019 and turned up several promising fossils, including a tyrannosaurus tooth, the first documented in the area, a vertebra, a leg bone, and other small fragments. They also documented the first Ricardoestesia in Wyoming during their trip to the Oregon Basin.
Following a two year delay, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Farke and his students returned to Wyoming and began working in earnest at the new site. The results proved spectacular: Farke and his students uncovered Osteichthyes, Chondrichthyes and Rhinobatoidea, which still exist today and are known as guitar fish. They also found more small marsupials, crocodile and alligator specimens, and turtles such as Neurankylus, and the dinosaurs Richardoestesia gilmorei, Ornithomimidae, Ceratopsidae and Hadrosauridae, many of them firsts for not just the Basin, but all of Wyoming.
“We’re looking at things that were probably living at the same time, but in very different conditions,” Farke said, comparing the two sites. “That’s our preliminary interpretation of the data.”
Of all the interesting discoveries made, Farke and his students have found that some of the rocks in Wyoming are much older than previously thought. The Teapot Sandstone, he said, has been accepted as being around 75 million years old, but several of the fossils found in the area are older, which will have implications on the area’s geological history, such as when mountains were formed.
The Alf holds a unique space in the world of museums. To start, it is the only accredited museum on a high school campus in the nation, but more impressive still is that the vast majority of its in-house collection has come not through donations, strategic acquisitions, or the careful excavations of seasoned professionals, but Webb’s own student body on their annual peccary trips, which first began in the 1930s.
The school’s peccary trips find their origin in Webbs teacher Ray Alf, who arrived at Webb in 1929. Alf, who had a career as a nationally ranked sprinter before turning to teaching, enjoyed fossil and rock hunting in his spare time and, in 1936, allowed a group of students to join him in the Mojave Desert for a collection trip. On that outing, one of his students uncovered the intact skull of a small mammal that was later identified as a new species of 15 million year old peccary, a piglike creature. Inspired by their discovery, Alf began taking his students out into the field as often as possible and amassed such a sizeable and impressive collection that, by the 1960s, the school broke ground on a formal museum, which opened in 1968 with Alf as both its namesake and director.
Today, students continue the tradition. The school has also developed an advanced research curriculum that allows them to participate at every level of the process, which includes fossil preparation and publishing academic articles on their research. Farke noted that the school, in continuing the tradition established by Alf, is not aiming to create the next generation of paleontologists, but “to create people who understand what science is, how it works; [who] understand why museums are important and why we should support them; and also, on a personal level, our own places as individuals in the history of our planet.”
Farke’s students, who attended the lecture, said they enjoyed their trips — some were returning for second or third years — and liked that their research was novel. While Farke noted early on that paleontology is a notoriously hard field to break into, Kvale couldn’t help but wonder if any of his students had been inspired to try anyway. Were any of those in attendance wanting, after going on their peccary trips, to become paleontologists themselves? Several hands rose.