IT’S WORTH EVERY PENNY. I WOULD DO IT AGAIN IN A HEARTBEAT.

have worried. When I asked if they wanted to drive for eight hours into Wyoming to dig for dinosaur bones, the answer came quickly and unanimously: Absolutely!

Two weeks later, we downloaded Disney’s The Good Dinosaur (the scientists at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center were consultants on the 2015 animated film, which takes place in what is modern-day Wyoming) onto the iPad and hit the road.

A privately owned facility, the Wyoming Dinosaur Center opened in 1995. It was the brainchild of a German-born, Switzerland-based veterinarian and amateur fossil collector, Burkhard Pohl, who vacationed in Wyoming in 1993. During his trip, Pohl fell in love with Thermopolis, which in addition to being a hub of oil and gas production is renowned for its elk hunting, fishing and hot springs. In that auspicious visit, Pohl and friends also discovered dinosaur bones on the ranch that he would subsequently buy and transform into the Wyoming Dinosaur Center.

Today, the centre constitutes a By late morning, even Henry had tired of the dirt so we headed back and ate our centre-provided sack lunches in the museum’s massive, air-conditioned storage area, where industrial shelving held dozens of excavated bones awaiting cleaning and classification. Then we headed into the laboratory, where Reddick sat us down at a cluttered table, put practice bones in front of us and provided us with toothbrushes, small hooks and containers of water to chip away sediment and clean the bones. Before bringing out her more efficient power tools.

As Reddick handed a drill to my four-year-old and pointed to where on the ancient fossil he should concentrate, I interrupted, fearful that he might, you know, make a mistake. She assured me that they set aside less-than-perfect bones for this exact scenario and then let him loose. He was thrilled, pressing the drill all over the bone and watching material flake away. There are few things in life more powerful for a preschooler than mechanized tools.

Eventually, we wrapped up our lab component and followed Reddick through the museum for a personal tour. The highlight was the centre’s most valuable display: a fossilized archaeopteryx from some 150 million years ago, one of 10 in the world (the others are all in Europe). A birdlike creature that had teeth, a tail and wings, the archaeopteryx is roughly the size of a crow. Pohl, the center’s founder, brokered the private sale of the fossil in 2006 and today it sits, on loan, under bulletproof glass with an elaborate security system.

I had no idea that one of the world’s most valuable fossils was under lock and key in the middle of Wyoming, and I was transfixed.