Carter County Museum - Ekalaka

Carter County Museum, founded in 1936, holds the distinct honor of being the first county museum founded in the State of Montana. Located within the town of Ekalaka, this little known museum houses some of the finest paleontological discoveries in the United States; as well as numerous artifacts depicting the lives of Native Americans and the early settlers of Carter County. Seventy-five million years ago Carter County was the home of many various species of dinosaurs and their contemporaries living in and along the marshes that bordered the retreating Pierre Sea, which had covered much of eastern Montana. Today their remains are being retrieved from the shale and sands where they were entombed. Among the paleontological finds, housed within the Museum, are a mounted skeleton of an Anatosaurus copei (duckbill, Hadrosaur), complete skulls of Triceratops horridus (three horns), Pachycephalosaurus wyomingenisi (dome head), and a Nannotyrannus lancensis (tiny Tyrannosaur), all collected in local exposures of the Hell Creek cretaceous formation.

Click here for more information about the Montana Dinosaur Trail.