EDWARDS, Colo. — Billy Doran spent 14 years searching for dinosaur bones in Colorado. He discovered so many he decided to open a dinosaur museum in Edwards.
"I have found hundreds of footprints. I have found hundreds of bones. I have bones from dozens of animals," Doran sadi. "I feel Mother Nature has given me the responsibility to be the steward of these fossils of these amazing treasures, and I thought one of the greatest things is to build a museum."
Museum at Dinosaur Junction is in the Edwards Learning Center in western Colorado. While small, the museum has a lot of big bones on display.
"This is Allosaurus, a true Colorado king of the Jurassic," Doran said. "This is the top predator here in Colorado 150 million years ago."
Like a lot of museums, the large dinosaur skeletons on display are replicas, but they represent the bones Doran has found in Eagle County.
"We got very lucky in Eagle County," Doran said. "We got very lucky those layers of rocks just happened to poke to the surface just down the street layers of Triassic time when dinosaurs first show up."
Guests can touch some of the bones found from when dinosaurs walked the land and swam in the oceans.
"We have pieces you can touch and look," Doran said. "These are real pieces of dinosaur bones. You have a piece of a giant long neck leg bones, but you can see the Allosaurus teeth marks where his teeth scraped across that like you eating a piece of fried chicken."
Nearly everything on display at the museum has been found near Edwards or in Eagle County. Doran said he’s finding more fossils every day.
"It’s not just Eagle County’s history," he said. "It’s Colorado’s history."
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