My favorite all-time tourism slogan for our state was the
short-lived BIG WYOMING, which described our towering mountains, vast high
plains, amazing deserts and long distances.
Just about
everything about Wyoming over the last 180 million years has also been BIG. Although
it was vast, the Wyoming of 180 million years ago sure looked different from
today.
Instead of
high plains with semi-arid desert lands and towering mountains, that earlier
place was wet. Very wet.
Wyoming is a
land of giants today. It truly was a land of giants back in its earliest days.
` Dinosaurs
roamed Wyoming as much as anywhere on earth. Literally thousands of dinosaur
specimens can be found in museums all across the planet that were found here in
the Cowboy State.
Fantastic
dinosaur displays can be found at the Knight Museum at the University of
Wyoming, the Tate Museum in Casper and the Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis.
And to show
just how long dinosaurs dominated our planet, it is interesting to note just
how long dinosaurs lived here. One way to reveal dinosaurs’ long dominance of
this place is to consider that modern man today is closer, time-wise, to a
Tyrannosaurus Rex, which disappeared 65 million years ago than that same Rex is
to the lumbering Brontosaurus that was pounding the turf here 150 million years
ago.
Wyoming is
home to Como Bluff, a relatively nondescript outcropping just off Highway 30
near Medicine Bow. That area has yielded
a treasurer trove of dinosaur bones over the past 125 years, or during the time
that Wyoming has been a state.
There are
wonderful sites all over Wyoming for people to experience sites formerly
occupied by extinct dinosaurs and giant mammals and get involved in real
archeological digs.
Besides the
pitfalls of evolution, super volcanoes wreaked havoc on those ancient
creatures. Wyoming has been home to the famous Yellowstone Supervolcano during
most of these years. Three of the most recent explosions occurred two million
years ago, 1.1 million years ago and 650,000 years ago.
It is due to
explode again and could blow, give or take, in a millennium. Scientists are
watching its every move. Books, movies and TV specials in recent years have
fostered this notion of imminent catastrophe.
And yet for
180 million years, Wyoming survived as a land of dinosaurs and then giant
mammals.
Early man arrived
here 13,000 years ago. Most experts think these were Asian people who crossed
the Bering Strait on a land and ice bridge.
From the time
man arrived in our space known as Wyoming people have wanted to record their
personal stories.
Long before
writing was developed, ancient people recorded tales of their daily lives on Wyoming’s
rock walls.
Perhaps these
were holy sites where people would study in hope of receiving a vision to guide
their way into their uncertain futures. Wyoming is full of these wonderful
places, which can inspire both awe and mystery to present-day visitors.
The ancient
tribes of hunter-gatherers traditionally recorded their stories by scrawling
messages on rock walls and creating eerie rock monuments. Were these sites
created or built to honor some long-forgotten god or celestial celebration?
When they
first arrived, it is assumed they hunted ancient mammals to extinction. These
included the mammoth and other giant beasts, which had evolved into super-large
versions of their kind because of no natural enemies – until man, arrived, that
is.
The Medicine
Wheel in the Bighorn Mountains is often called America’s Stonehenge because of
the mystery it portends. It is hundreds, maybe thousands of years old. Although its purpose is unknown to us but it
definitely lines up with certain bright stars, solar solstices and
constellations in the sky.
Without
horses, those early tribes used natural features of the landscape as a means to
provide food and skins for their survival. Two of the most famous are the Vore
Buffalo Jump near Sundance and the Wold site near the Hole-in-the-Wall between
Moneta and Kaycee.
Other sites
exist where earlier Wyoming residents trapped and killed the gigantic mammoth,
ultimately driving it to extinction. The Tate Geologic Museum in Casper has one
of the biggest skeletal specimens of these giant Wyoming mammoths.
Native peoples
dominated Wyoming until about 1720 when it is speculated Spanish invaders
barely touched the southeast corner of present-day Wyoming.
This had been
a glorious time for these hunter-gatherers before the onset of the European
invasion of their vast homelands.
Once the white
man arrived, life would never be the same again.
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