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Of the unusual geological building materials presented by this website, perhaps the most unusual are not stones in the strict sense but instead fossils, and specifically the fossil bones of dinosaurs of Jurassic age. To see a building of dinosaur bones, we travel to a rather bleak location on US Highways 30 and 287 (the old Lincoln Highway) in southeastern Wyoming, in the western United States of America. We're about eight miles east of the small town of Medicine Bow and ten miles west of the even smaller town of Rock River, and about forty miles northwest of Laramie. Just to the north is Como Bluff, the site of twenty-six different quarries from which dinosaur and other fossil remains were excavated in the late 1800s.
However, we don't need to go to the quarries to see dinosaur bones. Instead, our focus is on a small building, a roadside store, with walls consisting of dinosaur bones excavated from Como Bluff in the early 1900s. The building consists of 5,796 bones and was built by Thomas and Grace Boylan and their son Edward, with construction completed in 1933 as an attention-getting focus of the family's gas station. The structure was built to be the size of a Diplodocus, remains of which of were recovered in the formal paleontological excavation of six of the twenty-six quarries.
We'll start by looking at a general view of the store:
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