Dinosaurs can lead to big tourism bang, paleontologist says

GLASGOW — The Colorado paleontologist behind the making of Jurassic Park told more than 100 people in Glasgow Sunday night that dinosaurs could revitalize tourism in northeastern Montana.

By JENNIFER PEREZ
Tribune Hi-Line Bureau

In two years, a Long Island, N.Y., family wanting to take a trip to the rugged and scenic West will make their way to the Fort Peck Dam Interpretive Center and Museum Inc. near Fort Peck Dam, says the dinosaur expert Bob Bakker of Boulder, Colo.

It will be their fourth-grade daughter’s fascination with dinosaurs that will draw her and 10,000 other families across the country to visit dinosaur finds in Fort Peck like "Peck’s Rex," a 45-foot-long Tyrannosaurus rex.

"There’s no greater magic to mind, in my experience, than great fossils," Bakker told attendees of the museum’s annual meeting. "Dinosaurs are magic — they get kids to read, they get kids to think, they get kids to draw."

Bakker, who works as the adjunct curator at the Tate Museum at Casper College in Wyoming and has written four books, enlightened the group with dinosaur humor and a keen scientific insight into the vast world of dinosaurs — big and small.

Known for his mid-70s prediction that dinosaurs would be found with feathers, Bakker was named in the New Yorker magazine as the man responsible for the ideas behind the novel and movie Jurassic Park.

The $6 million, 18,000-square-foot interpretive center and museum is expected to open in May 2004, in time for the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Commemoration activities in Montana.

The center will focus on Lewis and Clark and other historical elements of eastern Montana, such as rural homesteading, fossil discoveries and the construction of the Fort Peck Dam.

Work at the Fort Peck paleontology field station between Fort Peck and the tiny community of Park Grove is in full swing. Team members prep fossils at the station, where they already have prepared the "Peck’s Rex" skull.

A world-class dinosaur attraction in the town of Fort Peck could draw fast-food restaurants, hotels and an extra 60,000 to 85,000 tourists a year, said Bakker, a member of the three-person paleontologist advisory board that is helping get the interpretive center off the ground.

He is joined on the advisory board by Malta paleontologist Nate Murphy and Fort Peck’s resident paleontologist Dr. J. Keith Rigby from Notre Dame University.

Highlighting Fort Peck’s dinosaur program will help the Phillips County Museum in Malta, said Murphy, the museum’s curator of paleontology who discovered the mummified dinosaur, skin and all, that is now known as "Leonardo."

"It’s common sense," Murphy said. "If the Fort Peck Interpretive Center is a destination place for people, then … what’s stopping them from stopping and seeing our dinosaurs in Phillips County? It’s a wonderful thing for northeastern Montana."

http://www.greatfallstribune.com/news/stories/20030120/localnews/811383.html