Fossile Butte National Monument

Not so much from our day across Wyoming, not a whole lot to see except rolling hills till we got into the mountains.  I will say that Wyoming has the nicest smoothest pavement I’ve ever been on.  They even had warning signs:  40MPH Caution Road Damage Ahead.  The first couple of them we’d slam on the brakes to see one or two grapefruit sized pot holes..  That’s it? That’s what I had to slow down for?

Fossil Butte was barely a speck on the map and we only found out about it a day or two earlier,  its tiny, hours from anything, and ended up being pretty darn cool.

I made the mistake AGAIN of believing that just because there’s dots on the map that one of these places must be big enough to have a gas station.  We almost didn’t go to Fossil Butte, by the time we got there we passed through several non existent towns, not even a scrap of wood or foundation to show there had even been something there and we were way low on fuel.  Fossil Butte was 4 miles off the road, or 8 total, it’d be close..  a coin toss decided that we’ll never be this way again we might as well go and deal with running out of gas later.  I’m glad we went, its an amazing place.

They had a timeline of earth’s history spread out along the four mile road and up the railing to the building.  Pretty cool to get a grasp of just how long a geologic age is and how short of an eye-blink of geologic time humans have been around.

Some of the best preserved fossils in the world come out of here,  snakes,

Insects,  you can even see the patterning on the wings still.

Crocs.

Many kinds of fish, this one is a gar exactly like the ones we used to catch in Texas.

Very cool Turtles

and sting rays.

Of course they had many kinds of plant life also, I like the palms and cat tails.