Bone bed deposits (accumulations of isolated vertebrate material) are often overlooked or under sampled in comparison to more glitzy and headline grabbing full skeletons, but they are very valuable for understanding ancient ecosystems.
Walter will review the different types of bone beds and discuss their methods of formation, distribution and significance. He will also explore some of the largest bone bed deposits found in the Hell Creek Formation and talk about a specific, multi-taxic bone bed called the Tooth Draw Quarry. Over the last 20 years in this site there have been recovered some 4,000 scientifically significant elements and over 2,000 tyrannosaur teeth.
This site reveals a lot about this incredible ancient ecosystem, the diversity of life at the end Cretaceous leading up to the extinction event, multiple dinosaur behaviors and even how the processes of taphonomy and fossilization operates.
About the Speaker
Walter Stein has been exploring for, excavating, preparing, researching and writing about dinosaurs and other vertebrate fossils since 1996. He has a BS degree in Geology from Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina (1994). He was the former curator and co-designer of the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center (in Woodland Park, CO), President of the Bighorn Basin Foundation, Collections Manager for the Wyoming Dinosaur Center, Field Collections Manager for Triebold Paleontology Inc., on the board of Directors for the Tri-State Museum and then later Interim-Director of the Museum. Walter is also the co-founder and previous chairman of the Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences (AAPS) “Journal of Paleontological Sciences”. He is currently on the board of directors of the AAPS and just recently co-founded the Hell Creek Paleo Society.
Walter has worked on well over 30 important dinosaur skeletons including a new species of giant North American Oviraptor (head preparator/excavator) and a potentially new species of Tyrannosaur (codiscoverer of "Sir William"). He has also worked on numerous other vertebrate finds including, the largest known Triceratops (“Big John”) skeleton, the largest mosasaur ever found in Texas (“Sophie"), the first ever plesiosaur bone bed from Montana (TMBB) and a very rare, short- necked plesiosaur ("Doc"-one of two of its species). He has spent the last 20 years studying a single, multi-taxic bone bed in the Hell Creek formation called the Tooth Draw Quarry, with thousands of dinosaur bones and tyrannosaur teeth.
In between, the big discoveries, Walter has authored a handful of scientific papers and has written two books on the study of paleontology; “So You Want to Dig Dinosaurs” (2001) and another called, “The Top 256 Rules of Paleontology” (April, 2009).
Walter and his wife Heather started their own private paleontological company called “PaleoAdventures” in 2005. PaleoAdventures provides a wide range of services to the education, museum, and tourist related industries, including: Dinosaur dig site tours, commercial internet fossil sales, lectures and educational programs for schools, clubs and museums, museum consultation and exhibit design, molding and casting, contract fossil preparation, paleontological resource assessments, and much, much more.
Walter's latest creation is the new “Dinosaurs of the Hell Creek Museum” in Belle Fourche, SD established in 2025. This new 6,500 sq ft. private museum will feature the PaleoAdventures research collection of original Hell Creek fossils, scientific grade casts, animatronics, a gift shop and a large fossil preparation laboratory where guests will be able to see and touch the amazing fossils being recovered from the South Dakota badlands.