Saturday-Sunday. If you watched any recent seasons of “Love Island,” or this year’s wildly popular “The Traitors,” you know that the hot Southerner known as Rob Rausch is a snake lover and expert. That may well drive new interest in reptiles and exotic animals, particularly as Repticon returns to Aurora, Saturday, March 21-Sunday, March 22. (Rausch won’t be there, unfortunately.)

The family-friendly show features a mixture of vendors and breeders with an array of animals “not normally seen in local pet stores,” (think snakes, lizards, turtles, spiders, scorpions and more). The show runs 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Sunday at Arapahoe County Fairgrounds, 25690 E. Quincy Ave. in Aurora. Tickets range in price by day, or are $15 for adults and $6 for kids (ages 5-12) for the whole weekend, with ages 4 and under. Visit for more details. — John Wenzel

Sunday shimmy

Sunday. Prepare to be tantalized and titillated at A Cause for Applause, a burlesque show coming to Lot 46 Music Bar in Edgewater on Sunday, March 22. The event acts as both a fundraiser and a preview for this summer’s Colorado Burlesque Festival, which takes place July 16-18. Performers include Cherry Pop Pop Poppins, Kitty Crimson, Betty Bootknocker and more. Expect sultry routines, sparkly costumes and sips for those 21-plus.

A Cause for Applause comes to Lot 46 Music Bar, 5302 W. 25th Ave. in Edgewater, 6-8:30 p.m. Sunday. Tickets cost $25.03 to $48.08 at . — Tiney Ricciardi

Even bigger dinosaurs

Opens Friday. Part of the attraction to dinosaurs is their towering stature, and Denver Museum of Nature & Science is doubling down on that with its newest exhibit, “The World’s Largest Dinosaurs,” running Friday, March 20-Sept. 7.

“Presented in the Phipps Gallery on the Museum’s third floor, the family-friendly exhibition takes visitors inside the colossal bodies of sauropod — the long-necked, long-tailed, plant-eating dinosaurs that ranged from 15 to 150 feet long and weighed an average of 12 tons,” organizers wrote. Check out interactive, kid-friendly features and watch a sauropod’s beating heart projected onto a 60-foot model.

The exhibition requires an extra ticket, $7-$9, in addition to museum general admission ($26 for adults, $21 for kids). 9 a.m.- 5 p.m. daily at 2001 Colorado Blvd. in Denver. Call 303-370-6000 or visit for more details. — John Wenzel

“Bad,” and very funny, Indians

Saturday. Taking the stuffing out of racist stereotypes is one of stand-up’s most excellent features, and so it is with “Bad Indian: A Native American Comedy Showcase.” Created and hosted by Joshua Emerson, a Denver-based Diné (Navajo) comedian, writer, and producer, “Bad Indian” is “an Indigenous comedy showcase dedicated to uplifting Native talent and expanding mainstream recognition of Native humor and storytelling.”

Shows at 7 and 9 p.m. on Saturday, March 21, at the Bug Theatre, 3654 Navajo St. in Denver. Tickets: $9.85 at . Visit for more details. — John Wenzel

Colorado is rich with prehistoric artifacts and culture stemming from the Paleo-Indian people of the southwest United States.

Two years ago, four Denver musicians put that Indigenous history to use by recording a 12-piece album featuring lithophones, which are stones chiseled and ground down more than 6,000 years ago to create musical instruments. Believed to predate ancestral Puebloans, the lithophones produce the sound of ringing bells.

“Gentle Worship,” the collaboration between composer Nathan Hall and Perc Ens — short for Percussion Ensemble, a minimalist classical trio — was released in September . The mood is dark and mysterious, the tone both opaque and crystal clear, the ancient sounds delivered in uncanny high-definition.

The particular lithophones used by the artists were discovered in archaeological sites in Great Sand Dunes National Park and the San Luis Valley. Each stone was hand-crafted into long, thin slabs with curved ends. Marilyn Martorano, an archaeologist and Alamosa native, studied the stones with support from a state historical fund grant.

Martorano’s research, which she presented with the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center , found that lithophones have been made by people on every continent and went by names such as “ringing rocks” or “rock bells.” When she struck one with a mallet and heard its chime, she said, “it made the hair on my arms stand up.”

After meeting with Martorano, hearing the lithophones and arranging them in a musical scale, Hall consulted with the leaders of the state’s Indian tribes regarding their use as instruments, last month. They were unaware of their uses and encouraged him to create music out of them, he said.

Hall and percussionists Jack Arman, Luke Wachter and Michael John McKee decamped to the town of Rangely to record from inside the TANK Center for Sonic Arts, a seven-story water tank that never, , served its original purpose. They take full advantage of the lithophones’ clear resonance and the studio in which they were recorded.

The seven movements that open the album are labeled in the credits as “stone echoes.” Hall tests the tank’s reverberating steel frame with finger snaps and the instruments’ bell tones, similar to those of xylophones.

Other instruments soon accompany the lithophones. Timpani drums, woodblocks, cymbals — even a trash bag — fill the void, adding depth and a rough, visceral texture to the dulcet chimes. On “Movement V,” Hall and his players use the lithophone as a tuning fork, arranging the notes and performing them as a vocal choir. Flute-like screeches scrape across the surface. Whistling evokes birds flying overhead.

Live, Perc Ens usually builds polyrhythms brick by brick and, through eye contact and improvisation, changes emphasis and structure. That intricacy and energy are evident in “Dressing and Trimming,” the album’s penultimate song and the one credited solely to the group. The trio up the tempo and strike the lithophones with precision and a propulsive stubbornness, an avant-garde “Carol of the Bells.”

It was not too long ago when Martorano first researched the use of these stone artifacts. At the time, she said, she thought she was the first person to hear their sound in thousands of years. Her research could be just scratching the surface; she believes other artifacts like them could be strewn elsewhere in Colorado.

On “Gentle Worship,” they’re available for others to hear, too. When they do, they’ll listen to the echoes of the early humans who created the instruments still reflecting into the future.

Museum crews came across the partial-bone fossil while conducting a geothermal drilling test to look at switching from natural gas to geothermal energy,

A research team was working on a simultaneous project to better understand the Denver Basin’s geology by drilling into the bedrock when they found a partial-bone fossil belonging to a 67.5 million-year-old dinosaur among the rocks taken from 763 feet below the surface.

“This is a scientifically and historically thrilling find for both the museum and the larger Denver community,” Curator of Geology James Hagadorn said in a statement. “This fossil comes from an era just before the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs, and it offers a rare window into the ecosystem that once existed right beneath modern-day Denver.”

Museum officials identified the fossils as the vertebrae of a plant-eating dinosaur similar to the , a 10- to 12-foot, two-legged animal that lived during the Cretaceous period, when Denver’s landscape consisted of tropical swamps, forests and floodplains.

The fossil is also similar to the herbivore , a larger four-legged dinosaur that roamed the region alongside fierce predators like the Tyrannosaurus rex.

“In my 35 years at the museum, we’ve never had an opportunity quite like this — to study the deep geologic layers beneath our feet with such precision. That this fossil turned up here, in City Park, is nothing short of magical,” research associate Bob Raynolds said in a statement.

Other dinosaur fossils found in metro Denver have been discovered through construction projects, including the partial skeleton of a triceratops in Highlands Ranch in 2019 and bone fragments found during the construction of Coors Field in 1994, inspiring the Colorado Rockies’ purple dino mascot, Dinger.

The fossil is now on display as part of the museum’s “Discovering Teen Rex” exhibit, which shows scientists working to prepare a juvenile T. rex fossil for public display after it was discovered by three boys in North Dakota.

The bones were unearthed from the famed Morrison Formation in Colorado between 2021 and 2022 by private fossil hunters, according to a journal article published last week in by those scientists.

The partial skeleton, which is missing its skull, was previously identified as a , but Susannah Maidment and Paul Barrett with quickly realized that didn’t quite fit.

Maidment said they were “immediately skeptical” of the Nanosaurus label when the museum received the fossils in January 2024 because that species of dinosaur was named nearly 150 years ago from fragmentary remains or bone imprints on rocks, not skeletons.

“There are no diagnostic features that allow us to say, ‘This is what a Nanosaurus is,’ so the first thing we had to do was get rid of it,” Maidment said. “It wouldn’t be recognized as a species (if discovered) today.”

When Nanosaurus was first named in 1877, few dinosaurs had been discovered, so the minimal characteristics that its fossils preserved would have been unique, she said.

Now, hundreds of small dinosaurs have been documented internationally and the Nanosaurus fossils aren’t useful in identifying them, Maidment said. It made more sense to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch.

The next step was discovering what the dinosaurs under the label were. The answer? A variety of small, misidentified dinosaur species thrown under the umbrella label.

“A new dinosaur is named, on average, once a week,” Maidment said. “Every time someone names something new, we all have to go back and revise what we thought we knew. … We’re constantly revising and going back through our collections and discovering we’ve got new specimens that we didn’t realize.”

The process of identifying a new dinosaur is long and hard, so when it happens, the paleontology community uses that data to judge its knowledge of species and continue evolving, she said.

Maidment and Barrett named the partial skeleton discovered on private Colorado land in Moffat County, an area called the Skull Creek Estates near Dinosaur, Enigmacursor mollyborthwickae, according to the article.

The fossils were sold through an antiques dealer and eventually made their way through a London art gallery to the museum, Maidment said.

Curators in London put the skeleton on display at the Natural History Museum last Thursday, the same day the article reclassifying it was published.

The two-legged herbivore was small and fast, with long legs, large feet and a small head, according to Barrett.

“It was living on the floodplains and alongside river systems, running under the feet of things like Diplodocus and Ceratosaurus and Stegosaurus and all your favorite dinosaurs from when you were seven,” Maidment said.

Scientists said the dinosaur discovered was only about one meter long, but there are signs that it wasn’t fully grown, according to a .

“One feature we look at in dinosaurs are the neural arches,” Barrett said in the release. “These are the top section of vertebrae, and form separately from the lower parts. They gradually merge as an animal gets older, so by examining them, you can see whether it was still growing.”

Many of the fossils’ arches were not yet fused, he said.

Barrett and Maidment said more discoveries could continue coming out of the Morrison Formation, where this fossil was found.

The from the Late Jurassic Period is named after the Colorado town but spans across the western United States, according to the National Park Service.

“While the Morrison Formation has been well-known for a long time, most of the focus has been on searching for the biggest and most impressive dinosaurs,” Maidment said. “Smaller dinosaurs are often left behind, meaning there are probably many still in the ground.”

Maidment said many discoveries in the Morrison Formation area feel like “trophy hunting” as people search for the biggest bones or the pointiest teeth.

“There’s a bias against small dinosaurs,” she said. “It also means that we don’t have a great picture of ecosystems and … what was living in these environments. And that affects our whole understanding of food webs and ecology and our world.”

Many small dinosaurs are out there waiting to be correctly classified in museum collections or unearthed from the ground, Maidment said. As people continue to work and learn, these discoveries will continue.

And he’s bringing large animatronic dinosaurs.

Josh Schmitz of Ruckus Hospitality, whose concepts include the Disco Pig and Ghost Saloon bars in Larimer Square, said he’s signed a five-year lease for the restaurant space on the ground floor of the building at 3501 Wazee St.

He’s rebranding the dozen-stall food hall as Clever Girl, aiming to make it a destination by transforming it into an “immersive experience that transports you to a prehistoric jungle.”

That will include the aforementioned dinosaurs, although Schmitz couldn’t say how many there will be.

Zeppelin Station was developed by, and is owned by, Denver-based Zeppelin Development. But the building has been overseen since last spring by The Stapleton Group, a receiver appointed at the request of Wells Fargo after Zeppelin defaulted on the building’s loan. JLL has been marketing the property for sale.

Schmitz said someone from Zeppelin reached out to him about taking over the food hall, but that he ultimately negotiated the deal with the receiver.

The food hall has struggled for years. In October 2022, an executive with then-owner RiNo Night Market LLC told investors the business had been operating deep in the red and owed its landlord $700,000. The Stapleton Group said in a court filing this past December that RiNo Night Market was still unable to pay its rent, and that he planned to terminate its lease.

Schmitz entered the Denver restaurant scene a decade ago, when he opened a bar and coffee shop on Colfax called Bellwether. But he became a ubiquitous part of the bar scene after COVID hit, when talented hospitality workers were suddenly available en masse.

Operating as Handsome Boys Hospitality, Schmitz and partners launched multiple creative concepts, moving into high-profile parts of Denver like Larimer Square.

Schmitz said he has since parted ways with his former Handsome Boys partners. They now operate as HB Hospitality, while he owns Ruckus.

The Zeppelin Station food hall has been quiet. Schmitz said only three stalls operate there: Sushi Kuro, Uptown & Humboldt and Pesto Italiano. Each has been paying between $2,400 and $3,500 a month in rent, according to a report from the receiver.

The three eateries will remain within Clever Girl as Schmitz brings in others.

“We’ll self-operate six of them and six of them will be outside concepts,” he said.

The Ruckus stalls will include Drunken Bakery and Hidden Gems Ice Cream, both formerly in Larimer Square, and a hot dog spot called Wieners & Losers. They’ll all be in place by April, when Zeppelin Station will officially become Clever Girl.

Post-COVID, Schmitz said, people don’t want to leave the house to have a normal beer at a normal bar. They want an experience, which is what he plans to create in RiNo.

He’s a fan of Casa Bonita — he had his 30th birthday celebration there — but said the business “fumbled the grand opening.”

“If Casa Bonita was easy to get into and had $5 margaritas, people would be there all the time,” he said.

Kids want to see the dinosaurs at Clever Girl? That����ap not a problem, according to Schmitz, who said the place will be family-friendly until 7 p.m. An escape room is also planned.

Clever Girl is being designed by KCIDY.

The fossil, dubbed “Apex,” is considered to be among the most complete ever found, according to the auction house.

The price blew past a pre-sale estimate of $4 million to $6 million and past a prior auction record for dinosaur fossils — $31.8 million for the remains of a , sold in 2020.

Apex “has now taken its place in history, some 150 million years since it roamed the planet,” said Cassandra Hatton, who heads Sotheby’s science-related business.

Dinosaur fossil sales stir some frustration among academic paleontologists who feel the specimens belong in museums or research centers that can’t afford huge auction prices.

Sotheby’s said the anonymous buyer is American and intends to look into loaning Apex to an institution in the U.S. The purchaser beat out six other bidders.

The stegosaurus was one of the world’s most distinctive , featuring pointy plates on its back. Hatton has called Apex “a coloring book dinosaur,” for its well-preserved features.

Eleven feet (3.3 meters) tall and 27 feet (8.2 meters) nose to tail, Apex was a big stegosaurus that lived long enough to show signs of arthritis, Sotheby’s said.

A commercial paleontologist named Jason Cooper discovered the fossil in 2022 on his property near, perhaps unsurprisingly, the town of Dinosaur, Colorado. The tiny community is near Dinosaur National Monument and the Utah border.

The dinosaur that Sotheby’s calls Apex stands 11 feet (3.3 meters) tall and measures 27 feet (8.2 meters) nose to tail, according to Cassandra Hatton, Sotheby’s global head of science and popular culture.

The stegosaurus, with its distinctive pointy dorsal plates, is one of the world’s most recognizable dinosaurs.

Apex, which Hatton called “a coloring book dinosaur,” was discovered in May 2022 on private land near the town of Dinosaur, Colorado. The excavation was completed in October 2023, Sotheby’s said.

Though experts believe stegosauruses used their fearsome tail spikes to fight, this specimen shows no signs of combat, Sotheby’s said. The fossil does show evidence of arthritis, suggesting that Apex lived to an advanced age.

Hatton said Apex was found “with the tail curled up underneath the body, which is a common death pose for animals.”

The dinosaur will be auctioned on July 17 as part of Sotheby’s “Geek Week” series.

Sotheby’s is estimating that it will sell for $4 million to $6 million, but that����ap just an educated guess.

“This is an incredibly rare animal,” Hatton said. “A stegosaurus of this caliber has never sold at auction before, so we will find out what it is actually worth.”

The trio announced their discovery publicly Monday at a Zoom news conference as workers at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science prepare to begin chipping the fossil out of its rock cast at a special exhibit called Discovering Teen Rex. The exhibit����ap opening on June 21 will coincide with the debut of the film “T.REX,” about the July 2022 find.

It all started when Kaiden Madsen, then 9, joined his cousins, Liam and Jessin Fisher, then 7 and 10, on a hike through a stretch of land owned by the Bureau of Land Management around Marmarth, North Dakota. Hiking is a favorite pastime of the brothers’ father, Sam Fisher.

“You just never know what you are going to find out there. You see all kinds of cool rocks and plants and wildlife,” he said.

Liam Fisher recalled that he and his dad, who accompanied the trio, first spotted the bone of the young carnivore. After its death around 67 million years ago, it was entombed in the Hell Creek Formation, a popular paleontology playground that spans Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas. The formation has yielded some of the most well-preserved T. rex fossils ever. Among them is Sue, a popular attraction at the Field Museum in Chicago, and Wyrex, a star at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

But none of them knew that then. Liam said he thought the bone sticking out of the rock was something he described as “chunk-osaurus” — a made-up name for fragments of fossil too small to be identifiable.

Still, Sam Fisher snapped a picture and shared it with a family friend, Tyler Lyson, the associate curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

Initially, Lyson suspected it was a relatively common duckbill dinosaur. But he organized an excavation that began last summer, adding the boys and a sister, Emalynn Fisher, now 14, to the team.

It didn’t take long to determine they had found something more special. Lyson recalled that he started digging with Jessin where he thought he might find a neck bone.

“Instead of finding a cervical vertebrae, we found the lower jaw with several teeth sticking out of it,” Lyson said. “And it doesn’t get any more diagnostic than that, seeing these giant tyrannosaurus teeth starring back at you.”

A documentary crew with Giant Screen Films was there to capture the discovery.

“It was electric. You got goosebumps,” recalled Dave Clark, who was part of the crew filming the documentary that later was narrated by Jurassic Park actor Sir Sam Neill.

Liam said his friends were dubious. “They did not believe me at all,” he said.

He, Jessin and Kaiden — who the brothers consider to be another sibling — affectionately dubbed the fossil “The Brothers.”

Based on the size of the tibia, experts estimate the dino was 13 to 15 years old when it died and likely weighed around 3,500 pounds (1,587.57 kilograms) — about two-thirds of the size of a full-grown adult.

Ultimately, a Black Hawk helicopter airlifted the plaster-clad mass to a waiting truck to drive it to the Denver museum.

Lyson said more than 100 individual T. rex fossils have been unearthed, but many are fragmentary. It is unclear yet how complete this fossil is. So far, they know they have found a leg, hip, pelvis, a couple of tailbones and a good chunk of the skull, Lyson said.

The public will get to watch crews chip away the rock, which the museum estimates will take about a year.

“We wanted to share the preparation of this fossil with the public because it is a remarkable feeling,” Lyson said.

Jessin, a fan of the Jurassic Park movies and an aspiring paleontologist, has continued looking for fossils, finding a turtle shell just a couple days ago.

For other kids, he had this advice: “Just to put down their electronics and go out hiking.”

This story has been updated to correct the name of the Denver exhibit that is chipping away at the rock encasing the T. rex fossil. The Denver Museum of Nature & Science confirmed the exhibit is called Discovering Teen Rex, not Teen Rex Prep Lab.

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The Rocky Mountain West has unparalleled access to artifacts from the dinosaur age because the uplift that formed the mountains unearthed layers of rock that were buried for millennia prior, said Bruce Schumacher, senior paleontologist with the U.S. Forest Service.

That����ap why when development companies start digging on new projects, they often stumble across dino remains. Even the Colorado Rockies’ triceratops mascot, Dinger, was inspired by fossil fragments found during the construction of Coors Field.

Because of that, the state boasts a robust paleontology community which, in turn, means many fossils end up on display locally. All the better for would-be dinosaur hunters.

Here are 10 places across Colorado where you can walk literally in the footsteps of long necks, see rare discoveries and even join an excavation.

Where to walk amongst the dinosaurs

Dinosaur Ridge (Morrison)

One of Colorado’s most iconic dinosaur locales is also one of its most easily accessible. Dinosaur Ridge in Morrison is a quick detour off I-70 and replete with fossils and tracks that are visible from a paved, two-mile road. The site includes a visitors’ center with indoor exhibit halls, kid-friendly digging areas and a gift shop. Those looking for more adventure can traverse the Triceratops Trail, a 1.5-mile gravel path that starts in Golden and provides access to a rare Tyrannosaurus Rex footprint. Be aware that Dinosaur Ridge is immensely popular, welcoming about 250,000 visitors per year. Guided tours are available in both areas. Free; more information at .

Dinosaur National Monument (Dinosaur)

The town of Dinosaur adopted its name in 1966 as a harbinger of its greatest asset, the Dinosaur National Monument. The 210,000-acre monument encompasses desert canyons in both Colorado and Utah where visitors can recreate and get a prehistory lesson. The most famous attraction is the Quarry Exhibit Hall, located in Utah, which features a vertical rock wall where 1,500 dino bones have been carefully excavated so they are visible as they would be at an active dig. While there aren’t fossils on the Colorado side of the monument, there are numerous places to camp, hike, raft, see petroglyphs and take a scenic, dinosaur-inspired drive. Day entry costs $15 to $25 depending on your vehicle, or it’s included with the purchase of a national parks pass; more info at .

Picket Wire Canyonlands (La Junta)

Southeastern Colorado is home to North America’s largest tracksite, which features more than 1,900 prints representing more than 130 different dinosaurs. Nestled deep within the Picket Wire Canyonlands (part of the Comanche National Grasslands near La Junta and Trinidad), hikers need to trek more than 11 miles round trip on foot to visit Dinosaur Lake in the remote Purgatoire River valley. But folks say it����ap worth it to see the thousands of tracks from herbivorous sauropods, carnivorous theropods on two legs, and even tracks from what experts believe to be . Free; more information at .

Rabbit Valley Trail Through Time (Mack)

If you’ve ever wanted to see a working quarry, the town of Mack, about 30 miles west of Grand Junction, is the place. The Rabbit Valley Trail Through Time is a 1.5-mile walkable loop that skirts a quarry where excavators have found thousands of bones from Jurassic-period giants like Camarasaurus and Allosaurus. The site turned up one of the oldest known fossils from a species called Iguanodon. Free; more information at .

West Gold Hill Dinosaur Tracksite (Ouray)

One of the world’s most intriguing dinosaur tracksites recently became part of the public domain. The West Gold Hill Tracksite in Ouray is unique because of both its size and pattern, which show a sauropod taking 134 consecutive steps and making a 270-degree turn. The tracksite has long been an open secret among locals, but since the U.S. Forest Service acquired the land where it resides in April, the agency is now prompting its whereabouts. Expect a steep hike up to 9,300 feet in elevation to see the prints in person. Free; more information at .

Where to see bones at their best

Dinosaur Journey Museum (Fruita)

Located in Fruita, about two hours south of the Dinosaur National Monument, the Dinosaur Journey Museum includes an exhibit hall with Jurassic-period fossils, life-size skeletal recreations, and animatronic dinosaurs including a T. Rex. Of particular note on display is a species called Fruitadens, one of the smallest non-bird dinosaurs ever discovered named for the town of Fruita where scientists found the first fossils. The museum also invites locals of all ages to join in real dino digs each summer. Tickets cost $9 for adults and $5 kids; more information at .

Denver Museum of Nature and Science (Denver)

There’s lots to explore at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, but dinosaur lovers will want to start on the building’s third level where skeletons tower over the exhibit hall and immerse visitors in the dinosaur age. Exhibits cover the ages pre- and post-dinosaurs, so patrons can learn about ancient plants, reptiles and mammals, and how the climate has evolved. There are also fossils guests can touch and an Earth Sciences Lab where volunteers prepare fossils for onsite displays. Tickets cost $24.95 for adults and $19.95 for kids, with additional fees for access to additional attractions like the planetarium; more information at .

Morrison Natural History Museum (Morrison)

Located five miles from the show-stopping Dinosaur Ridge, the Morrison Natural History Museum contextualizes Colorado’s role in the dinosaur age with fossil displays, history through the Ice Age, and hands-on exhibits. The museum, located in a refurbished cabin, is fueled by ongoing research that it does in-house as a nonprofit organization. It allows non-professionals to join excavations, too. General admission tickets cost $18 and kids’ admission costs $12; more information at .

The Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center (Woodland Park)

The Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center near Colorado Springs is something of a showroom for its parent company, , which has been collecting fossils since 1989. Its founder Mike Triebold is said to have discovered several “firsts” in the field, such as the first complete and intact skeleton of Protosphyraena perniciosa, a prehistoric fish. In 2022, the Triebold Paleontology team discovered a juvenile T. Rex and many of the bones they have so far are on display, including shoulder bones and vertebrae. The bones indicate the animal was injured while alive and some also have gnaw marks on them from after it was deceased. Tickets cost $13 for adults and $9 for children; more information at .

Royal Gorge Dinosaur Experience (Cañon City)

At the Royal Gorge Dinosaur Experience in Cañon City, visitors don’t get to just look at fossils and relics, they also get to play among them. In addition to a 10,000-square-foot museum, the venue includes a digging area for kids to excavate their own treasures, a “wild walk” that takes patrons through a landscape dotted with life-size animatronic dinos, and two ropes courses that offer aerial views of all of the above plus the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and the Royal Gorge Bridge. The venue is near an active quarry called the , the site of , so you could swing by both places on one trip. Tickets range $15 to $41.95 for adults and $12 to $31.95 for kids depending on how many attractions you want to experience; more information at .

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“To have this in our own backyard,” Mayor Guyleen Castriotta said. “You can’t beat it.”

The Friday afternoon field trip was the result of Northglenn High School geology teacher Kent Hups stumbling across dinosaur fossils about three years ago while out scouting.

Hups is who has excavated fossils throughout the West for decades. During the height of the pandemic, he stayed closer to home and took his high school geology students on virtual walks around his community hunting for natural treasures he could share with them over Zoom.

That’s when he first found dinosaur fossils on Broomfield open space, adjacent to a suburban neighborhood. To help preserve the area, Hups doesn’t want to disclose the exact location.

“I’m excited as hell,” Hups said. “You do a lot of whooping and hollering by yourself when you find these things. When you find footprints, you’re looking at something that was left by a living animal. To be able to touch that — it����ap like 70 million years ago, this thing was alive and stepped right here. I’m stepping in the same place. It����ap an amazing feeling.”

Traversing through thick grasses and shimmying up and down steep hills, Hups led the class to three dinosaur footprints, but said there were surely more in the area. The fossilized footprints looked like garden stepping stones jutting up from the grass, a little larger than a basketball with ridges and indentations that Hups explained were the dinosaurs’ toes.

Based on the toe patterns, Hups said it was a horned dinosaur — possibly a Triceratops.

It took a while working with the city of Broomfield to get the proper permits, but on Friday, Hups was finally able to take some students to investigate the area. He handed out plastic bags to the teens — some who had trekked out in Doc Marten boots and Converse sneakers — and showed them how to crouch low to inspect the dirt for bones.

Alanna Santa Cruz, 15, whipped a magnifying glass out of her back pocket as she squatted on the ground, her knees touching the earth through the ripped holes in her jeans.

Alanna is in Hups’ school paleontology club.

“When I was a kid, I was obsessed with dinosaurs,” she said. “I knew all about them and had a bunch of the toys and watched all the movies. I wanted to see what it would be like to be a paleontologist.”

The area they visited Friday was ripe with small fossils and bones sticking out of the ground among rocks, cacti and dirt. Some were more obvious to the untrained eye — shaped like vertebrae, for example — while others could be confused for stones and debris. The pieces of creatures were small enough to fit in the palm of a hand and scattered everywhere, broken into bits after years of exposure.

Students approached Hups with cupped palms full of objects. Sometimes Hups told them they had just found a mineral, but other times, his eyes lit up as he announced they had found bone.

“If you’re not sure, lick it,” Hups said, bringing an object from the ground to his lips and grazing it with his tongue. “If it sticks to it like ice, that’s a fossil.”

Hups’ students looked at their teacher with disgusted grimaces.

“Try it!” he said with delight.

“No, thanks, mister,” Alanna said.

When Hups turned his back, Alanna marveled at an object in her hand, turning it over and over trying to determine its value. She brought it to her mouth and snuck a quick lick.

“You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” she said, declaring it a fossil and popping it into her bag.

The class wrote down the GPS coordinates of their finds so they can bring them back later in the year after they’re done investigating them, so as not to disturb the natural resources, Hups said.

Jonah Rotert, 17, was quiet and reserved at the start of the trek, but he couldn’t help but grin as his bag filled with tiny bones belonging to prehistoric creatures. Hups said he was sure Rotert had found a crocodile bone.

“It’s a really cool feeling,” Rotert said. “I’m the first person to touch these in millions of years.”

Millions of years ago, these massive creatures walked where the class stood, Hups said, pointing toward cars speeding down U.S. 287 in the distance.

“I love seeing the modern on top of ancient life,” Hups said.

Next school year, the students will present their findings to the city of Broomfield and come up with ideas on how to educate the public about the land, the fossils and how important it is to report findings, Hups said.

“What did this environment look like all these years ago?” Hups said. “Until we find fossils, we don’t know. What’s most important about them is the story they tell.”

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