Wyoming’s Fossil Cabin, ‘World’s Oldest Building,’ Moved To Medicine Bow Museum

Wyoming’s world-famous Fossil Cabin, built from more than 6,000 dinosaur bones and weighing 52 tons, made a nail-biting, seven-mile crawl this week to a new permanent home at the Medicine Bow Museum. The cabin was once featured by Ripley’s Believe It Or Not as the “World’s Oldest Cabin” because of its building materials—6,000-some dinosaur bones mortared together by Thomas Boylan in 1932 to create a unique roadside attraction for his gas station along U.S. Highway 30 near Como Bluff.

The move was an epic slow-motion crawl and a nail-biter, said Alliance for Historic Wyoming’s Megan Stanfill. “One of the biggest challenges is dealing with the type of materials being used in the construction,” she said. “Fossils are brittle. They’re very easily crumbled.” The mortar between the fossils is also a worry. Medicine Bow Mayor Justin George said, “From what I understand, it doesn’t have any Portland cement in it, which helps hold things together. If you think about shaking something like that? It’ll just turn to sand and fall apart if you shake it too much.”

The situation had everyone on edge. The company doing the move framed the cabin inside and out to reinforce it, welded steel bracing between I-beams placed underneath, and excavated around the cabin to build a movable platform. The entire cabin was wrapped in plastic for the journey to protect fragile fossil surfaces. George paced back and forth the entire time. When he finally saw the cabin on the horizon—still intact—he breathed a sigh of relief.

Moving a 105,116-pound fossil puzzle was not smooth. Former Medicine Bow Museum Director Sharon Biamon said they started planning seven or eight years ago, but the original mover couldn’t do it—it was too heavy. They hired a much more expensive mover from North Dakota and pursued grant money. Where the cabin had been sitting, it was being vandalized. Tourists chipped fossils straight out of its walls, and displays inside were stolen. Now the cabin will be in a community that cares about its history. The museum plans to weatherize the windows and roof to ensure the cabin can stand for another 100 years.

The cabin’s new home connects to the history of Como Bluff, one of the first places on Earth where large numbers of dinosaur skeletons were found and systematically quarried in the late 1870s and 1880s. It is where the infamous Bone Wars happened—a 19th-century rivalry between Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope. After Union Pacific workers noticed large bones eroding from the bluff in 1877, Marsh sent crews West. Cope soon followed. The two men instructed their camps to spy on each other, commit sabotage, steal bones, and even brandish weapons. If one side had to leave a quarry, they would smash or blow up bones rather than allow their rival a chance. Both burned through fortunes, and their hasty naming of species caused taxonomic confusion that took decades to unravel.

George believes the cabin will be a tourism draw. “I drive this country all the time, and there are always vehicles stopped there where it used to sit at Como Bluff. I think, with it being here, having a museum right next to it, being more organized and accessible, I think it will increase tourism here. There are a lot of people who are really into that archaeological part of history.” Biamon added, “We’re on the map for the Virginian, and we have the Owen Wister cabin. This fossil cabin is just a fantastic addition. I think it’ll be a big boost for Medicine Bow’s economy.”