Deep Time: A Dinosaur and Fossil Trip for Families
Theodore Roosevelt was nine years old when he founded the Roosevelt Museum of Natural History in his bedroom — specimens catalogued, labelled and written up in a child's careful hand. If you are travelling with a kid who picks things up off the ground and wants to know what they are, this is the trip.
Western North Dakota is unusually good country for it, but not quite in the way people expect. The badlands around Medora are Fort Union rock — Paleocene, roughly 66 to 56 million years old, laid down by rivers and swamps after the dinosaurs were gone. That is why Theodore Roosevelt National Park is famous for petrified wood rather than bones. Drive an hour west into Montana, or east to the museums, and you reach the Hell Creek layer that actually produces Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops.
Three days does it honestly. Four if you add Bismarck, which you should.
Day one: Medora, and the ground under your feet
Start at the Library and the South Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The striped walls you are looking at are river and swamp sediment from the few million years after the extinction — the world that came next, once the dinosaurs had gone. It is a good thing to be able to point at.
The park holds the third-highest concentration of petrified wood of any site in the United States. Those stumps were standing trees in a subtropical floodplain forest.
The Petrified Forest itself is a serious undertaking, not a roadside stop: the trailhead is in the park's remote southwest corner, reached by about fifty minutes of dirt and gravel from Medora, and the shortest visit is a three-mile out-and-back with no shade, no water and no facilities. The road is impassable when wet. Check with a ranger before you commit, and skip it with small children.
Half a day to a full day · no driving beyond Medora, or about 25 gravel miles each way for the Petrified Forest
Day two: Dickinson and the Badlands Dinosaur Museum
Thirty-six miles east of Medora, the Badlands Dinosaur Museum holds the largest number of mounted dinosaurs on display in North Dakota — Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, Triceratops, Edmontosaurus, Albertosaurus, Thescelosaurus, the Triceratops skulls known as Bill and Larry, and a real T. rex leg.
The part children remember is the window into the preparation lab, where you can watch staff cleaning bone that came out of the ground recently. There is an augmented-reality sandbox and a family activity area as well, and one ticket also covers the Joachim Regional Museum next door.
Hours and admission shift with the season and the galleries are part-way through an overhaul, so ring ahead on 701-456-6225 before you drive over.
Three to four hours · 36 miles east of Medora, about 35 minutes
Day three: Bismarck, and a dinosaur with skin
The North Dakota Heritage Center's Adaptation Gallery: Geologic Time runs from a Cretaceous inland sea through the dinosaurs, the extinction, the savanna mammals that followed, and the Ice Age. Admission is free.
The reason to come is Dakota — a mummified Edmontosaurus found in southwestern North Dakota in 1999, one of a handful of dinosaur fossils anywhere that preserves skin rather than only bone. Dakota is displayed outside the gallery. Exactly what is in the case has changed over time, so call 701-328-2666 if seeing a particular part of it is the reason you are making the drive.
Half a day · 135 miles east of Medora, about two hours
Optional: Makoshika State Park, Montana
An hour west of Medora at Glendive, Montana's largest state park cuts into Hell Creek rock — the last few hundred thousand years of the Cretaceous, the layer that actually produces Tyrannosaurus. The visitor centre has a Triceratops skull found in the park. Non-resident day use is $8 per vehicle. Note the time zone changes.
Half a day · about 60 miles west of Medora, roughly an hour
Digging for real
The North Dakota Geological Survey runs public fossil digs each summer, and this is the thing that turns the trip from looking into doing. The Family Half Days near Bismarck work a Hell Creek quarry and take children from age ten at $45 a place; full days are $75 and fifteen and over. Registration opens on 31 January and is first come, first served, so places go early.
Two honest warnings. The Badlands Dinosaur Museum's own field programme is not a family activity — it is a competitive volunteer crew, sixteen and over, two-week minimum, camping in a field. And the Geological Survey's Dickinson-area prospecting dig is explicitly unsuitable for children: rough terrain, fifteen and over, no shade and no facilities.
If you want your kids in the dirt with a tool in their hand, the Bismarck Family Days are the one to book.
Half a day · near Bismarck, booked in advance through the North Dakota Geological Survey