Between Rock River and Medicine Bow lies a low ridge called Como Bluff.  Nothing much is happening now, but millions of years ago a spectacular assortment of dead dinosaurs piled up here.  In the 1880's Como Bluff was the site of a ferocious battle between two rival dinosaur experts, Professor Othniel C. Marsh of Yale and Professor Edward Drinker Cope of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences.  Two Wyoming railroad workers, William Reed and William Carlin, started it all when they came across a lonely line camp hut built entirely of large dinosaur bones.  They found the bones' source at Como Bluff and using aliases, contacted Professor Marsh.  Marsh was unable to keep Cope in the dark for long and soon Reed became Marsh's man and Carlin became Cope's.  Both professors had excavation crews competing fiercely to find the best specimens first.  Tensions were so high that violence was a constant possibility, and work crews smashed any bones they left behind when they finished digging in an area.  By 1889 the quarry was stripped of its important contents and the excitement died down.

Como Bluff's impact on the scientific world was truly profound, however -- the first diplodocus dinosaurs were discovered here, along with bones by the thousands from a smorgasbord of other dinosaurs and virtually all 250 known mammals of Jurassic North America.  Today, there's little left at the site itself, but a small museum/gift shop built of dinosaur bones offers you a place to stop.  If you have ever gazed at the dinosaurs in Yale's Peabody Museum, the Smithsonian, or the New York Museum of Natural History, you have almost certainly looked at Wyoming natives -- animals who turned to stone at Como Bluff.