From the outside, the Wyoming Dinosaur Museum doesn’t look like much, in fact, it looks like a barn for long-haul trucks, but don’t let that fool you, inside are many many beautiful and amazing fossils.

Many of the fossils are arranged in life-like poses like this nest of dinosaur babies. The collection is probably most notable for the huge Supersaurus that stretches the length of the big hall, but I didn’t think my iPhone camera would do it justice. If you click their link, you can see what it looks like. The collection also contains the only Archaeopteryx in North America, as well as a 35-foot T-Rex and several Triceratops (which happens to be the Wyoming state dinosaur). There are more than 30 skeletons of the Allosaurus, a fossil fish from Scotland, as well as flying reptiles from Brazil, dinosaurs from China and marine reptiles from several continents.

While the big dinosaurs were truly impressive, what I liked best were the little ones like these two, posed as they might have been in life. For one thing, these aren’t casts, these are real fossilized bones. The Supersaurus is a cast, mostly because it’s so big that it would be impossible to support the weight of all those fossilized bones. What we both really liked was that in the cases below the Supersaurus were some of the actual fossilized bones, with great signage pointing out the lines that signaled growth plates.

The collection is really impressive. As much as I loved the fossils that appeared to be like live beings, I think my favorites were the many beautiful graphic fossils like this one: