The life-size tyrannosaurus rex statue towering beside the entrance of the University of Wyoming’s Geological Museum celebrated its 50 anniversary last Friday. The statue was built by Samuel H. “Doc” Knight in 1963.
Paul Heller, department head of the Geology department at UW, said the statue is more than just some statue, but rather a symbol of the heritage of the geology department.
“To me, it’s an analog of the fact that geology is rooted in the past, but it’s also trying to build for the future,” Heller said. “This great big dinosaur is an example of it, sort of his last great contribution.”
Heller said the department’s history goes far beyond the dinosaur and Sam Knight. The department, he said, was built from scratch by Knight’s father, Wilbur Knight. When the department was established, it was much smaller than it is now, consisting of a mere eight men who only thought of geology in terms of the Rocky Mountains.
Over the last 50 years, Heller said, the department has seen great expansion. He said the fact that most of the faculty now have projects all across the globe shows how far it has come. One UW researcher, for example, is doing a project about ice melting in Greenland being funded by Scandinavian nuclear power companies.
The department recently received a $20 million grant to start the Wyoming Center for Environmental Hydrology and Geophysics (WyCEHG). A collaboration between Heller’s faculty as well as faculty in geography, engineering, agriculture and many others, the goal of the project is to utilize new technologies to measure the interactions between plants, geology and weather on a regional level. This grant has helped UW become one of the few schools in the country to have a department in hydrogeophysics, Heller said.
Connor Marr, a graduate student in the Geology department, said his experience with the department has been rewarding.
“(It has) an awesome group of people who do a lot of cool stuff,” Marr said.
The Chicago transfer started at UW last fall as a graduate student. He said the department in Chicago was tiny compared to the department here and that Wyoming’s has much better focus overall.
Another graduate student in the Geology department, Mat Dunlop said the faculty in the department are heavily influential figures within the field of geology as a whole.
“There’s stuff I learned about when I was an undergrad,” Dunlop said, “that geology students across the country, across the world, learn that people in this department discovered, or first described.”
“Your phone has gold in it, it’s got chrome in it, it’s got rare earth elements in it and without geologists learning how to find those resources…” Dunlop said. “Honestly, our civilization would not be possible the way it is – we’d still be cavemen. That’s why geology is important.”
