BYU’s Museum of Paleontology is one of nine locations on campus that extended its hours on Saturday, October 10, for the BYU homecoming game. Many visitors came to the museum to view the prehistoric excitement within its walls.
BYU alumnus Ryan Clark attended the museum in the hours before BYU’s homecoming football game started. One of his children ran among dinosaur bones, squealing with excitement.
“[My kids] think it’s cool,” Clark said. “They love this kind of stuff.”
Museum attendees are able to gain a new perspective on ancient life as they touch various fossils and view maps and pictures of the dinosaurs’ homeland. Visitors can even practice cautiously dusting dirt off of dinosaur bones as paleontologists do.
“It’s cool that they can touch some of it. It’s interactive,” Clark said.
Next to each set of bones is a plaque with facts about the dinosaur, a full diagram of the dinosaur that the bones belong to, and an illustration of a human, comparing the height of the human to the dinosaur.
The educational aspect of the museum impressed BYU dance professor Emily Kleinkopf.
“I like how they focus on the different time periods of the dinosaurs and say where they’re from,” Kleinkopf said. “I didn’t know a lot of dinosaurs came from certain time periods.”
Many attendees stated how impressed they were by the vastness of the museum’s collection. BYU linguistics major Jeremy Coburn attended the museum with his wife after seeing information about it online.
“I saw online . . . that this was one of the things that they recommend people go see: the paleontology museum,” Coburn said. “I’m actually surprised by how much they have. It’s been pretty impressive.”
The BYU Museum of Paleontology grew out of material collected by James A. “Dinosaur Jim” Jensen, who came to BYU in 1961. The initial structure for the museum was built in 1976. By the time Jensen retired in 1984, however, much of the collection was still unprepared and being stored under the BYU football stadium.
Former museum director Ken Stadtman and current director Rod Scheetz and their staffs spent countless hours preparing the collected material and adding material from their own digs. The museum now proudly displays these fossils in a number of rooms and laboratories at its current location.
“It’s one of the largest collections of late Jurassic [to] early Cretaceous dinosaur bones in North America,” Seiley said. “We get a lot of really cool visitors . . . and we help a lot of people do their research. It’s really fun.”
The museum is open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and 2 hours prior to each home football game. It is located just west of the LaVell Edwards Football Stadium.