From the badlands of Montana to the prehistoric shores of Maryland, these ten American states offer remarkable opportunities to walk in the footsteps of dinosaurs and uncover ancient fossils. Whether you're searching for Tyrannosaurus rex remains or trilobites from ancient seas, these destinations combine scientific wonder with hands-on discovery that will transport you millions of years into the past.
The United States is a paleontological treasure trove, with vast stretches of ancient rock formations that preserve millions of years of Earth's history. From the Late Cretaceous badlands of the Northern Plains to the Jurassic deposits of the Southwest, fossil hunters and dinosaur enthusiasts can explore sites where prehistoric giants once roamed. Many of these locations allow visitors to see fossils in situ, walk alongside actual dinosaur tracks, and even participate in fossil hunting with proper permits.
Whether you're a serious paleontology enthusiast, a family looking for an educational adventure, or simply curious about the ancient past, these ten states offer some of the most accessible and impressive fossil sites in North America. Many locations feature visitor centers, guided tours, and designated areas where collecting is permitted under specific regulations.
Montana: Land of the Tyrannosaurus Rex
Montana stands as one of the premier destinations for dinosaur fossils in the world, particularly for Late Cretaceous specimens. The state's Hell Creek Formation has yielded more Tyrannosaurus rex fossils than anywhere else on Earth, along with Triceratops, hadrosaurs, and numerous other species that lived during the final days of the dinosaurs.
The Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman houses one of the world's largest collections of dinosaur fossils, including multiple T. rex specimens and extensive collections of dinosaur eggs and embryos. The museum offers field experience programs where visitors can participate in actual paleontological digs under professional supervision.
In northeastern Montana, the Fort Peck Reservoir area and surrounding badlands offer fossil hunting opportunities on public lands. The Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge contains exposed Late Cretaceous rocks where erosion constantly reveals new specimens. While you cannot remove vertebrate fossils without permits, hunting for invertebrate fossils and petrified wood is allowed in designated areas.
Where to Hunt in Montana
The Makoshika State Park near Glendive provides trails through badlands where dinosaur bones erode from hillsides. The visitor center displays local finds and provides information about the geology. For a truly unique experience, several commercial fossil sites near Bynum and Choteau allow fee-based fossil digging where you can keep what you find, including small dinosaur bone fragments and fossilized shells.
Utah: A Jurassic Wonderland
Utah's reputation as a dinosaur paradise is well-deserved, with world-class sites spanning from the Jurassic Period through the Cretaceous. The state's Morrison Formation has produced an extraordinary diversity of Jurassic dinosaurs, while younger rocks contain remarkable trackways and bone beds.
Dinosaur National Monument, straddling the Utah-Colorado border, features the spectacular Quarry Exhibit Hall where visitors can see over 1,500 dinosaur bones still embedded in the rock face. This concentration of Apatosaurus, Allosaurus, Stegosaurus, and other dinosaurs represents an ancient river channel where carcasses accumulated 149 million years ago.
The Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry in central Utah holds the densest concentration of Jurassic dinosaur bones ever discovered, with over 12,000 bones from at least 70 individual dinosaurs excavated. Remarkably, Allosaurus dominates the site with remains from at least 46 individuals, creating an ongoing paleontological mystery about why so many predators died in one location.
Utah's Trackway Sites
For dinosaur tracks, Mill Canyon Dinosaur Tracksite near Moab offers free access to well-preserved sauropod and theropod tracks. The St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm preserves over 2,000 dinosaur tracks from the Early Jurassic, including rare swimming traces. The tracks are displayed in an excellent museum built directly over the track-bearing layers.
Wyoming: Fossil Butte and Beyond
Wyoming offers a different paleontological perspective with its Fossil Butte National Monument, where 50-million-year-old lake deposits preserve extraordinarily detailed fossils of fish, insects, plants, birds, and even bats. The Green River Formation here represents one of the world's best records of an ancient lake ecosystem, with fossils so well-preserved that soft tissues, scales, and even color patterns can be studied.
Several commercial quarries near Kemmerer allow visitors to split shale and keep the fish fossils they find, making this one of the most rewarding fossil hunting experiences for beginners. Species like Knightia (a small herring-like fish) are abundant, and more rarely, collectors find stingrays, crocodilians, and the beautiful fossil fish Priscacara.
For dinosaur enthusiasts, the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis operates one of the few dinosaur museums with active dig sites open to visitors. Their Dig for a Day program allows participants to work alongside paleontologists at real excavation sites, uncovering Jurassic dinosaur bones from the Morrison Formation.
Como Bluff Historic Site
The Como Bluff area, along Interstate 80, represents one of the most important dinosaur discoveries in history. Here in the 1870s, the famous "Bone Wars" between rival paleontologists Cope and Marsh led to the discovery of numerous dinosaur species. Today, visitors can explore the historic cabin built from dinosaur bones and search the surrounding hills.
Colorado: Dinosaur Ridge and Ancient Trackways
Colorado combines spectacular trackways with important bone deposits, offering diverse paleontological experiences within easy reach of Denver. Dinosaur Ridge, just west of Denver, features one of the world's most famous dinosaur tracksites, where Jurassic sauropod tracks and Cretaceous ornithopod tracks are preserved on tilted rock layers.
The site offers guided tours where you can touch actual dinosaur tracks and see exposed dinosaur bones weathering from the Dakota Hogback. The combination of tracks and bones in such an accessible location makes Dinosaur Ridge a premier educational destination.
In western Colorado, the Trail Through Time near Grand Junction connects multiple paleontological sites, including the Rabbit Valley tracksite with its numerous dinosaur footprints. The nearby Museums of Western Colorado operates the Dinosaur Journey Museum and offers summer dig programs at the Mygatt-Moore Quarry.
Florissant Fossil Beds
Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument preserves a 34-million-year-old ecosystem with incredibly detailed fossils of insects, plants, and even birds. The giant petrified redwood stumps at the site demonstrate the dramatic climate changes Colorado has experienced. While collecting is prohibited in the monument, the visitor center displays exceptional specimens including butterflies with preserved wing patterns.
South Dakota: Badlands Fossil Beds
South Dakota's Badlands National Park contains one of the world's richest deposits of Oligocene mammal fossils, dating from 37 to 23 million years ago. While dinosaurs had long since vanished, this period saw the evolution of many modern mammal groups, and the Badlands preserve an exceptional record of this evolutionary radiation.
Fossils of ancient rhinoceroses, saber-toothed cats, three-toed horses, and oreodonts (extinct sheep-sized herbivores) erode from the soft mudstone formations. The park prohibits fossil collecting, but the Fossil Exhibit Trail features replicas of fossils in the locations where they were discovered, and rangers lead fossil talks during summer months.
Nearby, the Mammoth Site of Hot Springs preserves the remains of over 60 Columbian and woolly mammoths that died in an ancient sinkhole. This active paleontological site allows visitors to watch ongoing excavations and participate in special digging programs. The concentration of mammoths makes this one of the largest mammoth sites in the world.
Texas: Dinosaur Valley State Park
Texas's Dinosaur Valley State Park near Glen Rose contains some of the best-preserved dinosaur tracks in the world. The Paluxy River cuts through 113-million-year-old limestone, exposing extensive trackways of sauropods and theropods. During summer low-water periods, visitors can walk in the actual riverbed and see tracks clearly pressed into the rock.
The tracks include some of the longest continuous sauropod trackways ever discovered, showing where these massive dinosaurs walked along an ancient shoreline. Theropod (meat-eating dinosaur) tracks, likely from Acrocanthosaurus, parallel some of the sauropod trails, creating speculation about predator-prey interactions.
For fossil hunters, Big Bend National Park in West Texas contains extensive Cretaceous marine fossils in its mountain ranges, along with dinosaur bones and tracks. While collecting is prohibited in the national park, the surrounding areas and nearby Big Bend Ranch State Park offer fossil hunting opportunities with proper permits.
Texas Fossil Hunting Locations
The Lake Lewisville area north of Dallas provides public access to Cretaceous marine fossils, where ammonites, oysters, and other seashell fossils can be collected from eroded areas. The Mineral Wells Fossil Park allows free public fossil collecting, where you can find 300-million-year-old marine invertebrate fossils including brachiopods, crinoids, and bryozoans.
New Mexico: Triassic Treasures
New Mexico offers a window into the Triassic Period, the dawn of the dinosaur age, with some of the earliest dinosaur fossils discovered. The Ghost Ranch area northwest of Albuquerque yielded hundreds of skeletons of Coelophysis, one of the earliest dinosaurs, preserved in a mass death assemblage from 205 million years ago.
Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness contains Late Cretaceous badlands where erosion reveals dinosaur bones, petrified wood, and fascinating rock formations. While vertebrate fossil collecting requires permits, the landscape itself offers a surreal paleontological experience. The area has yielded fossils of Parasaurolophus, Pentaceratops, and various other dinosaurs.
For accessible fossil hunting, the Rockhound State Park near Deming allows visitors to collect up to 15 pounds of minerals and fossils, including geodes and petrified wood. The park provides a family-friendly introduction to collecting with designated areas and basic tools available.
Arizona: Petrified Forest Fossils
Petrified Forest National Park preserves one of the world's most spectacular concentrations of petrified wood, along with Late Triassic fossils that document the rise of dinosaurs. The park's 225-million-year-old rocks contain early dinosaur relatives, giant amphibians, and some of the oldest dinosaur fossils in North America.
The Rainbow Forest Museum displays extraordinary specimens including "Old Faithful," a massive petrified log, and fossils of the heavily-armored Desmatosuchus and the dinosauromorph Chindesaurus. The park's wilderness areas contain thousands of fossil sites that researchers continue to study.
While collecting is strictly prohibited within the national park, the surrounding areas contain private land and designated collection areas where petrified wood hunting is permitted. Several rock shops in the area offer information about legal collecting sites. The Jim Gray's Petrified Wood Company operates a fossil park where collecting is allowed for a fee.
Arizona's Marine Fossil Sites
Southern Arizona's mountain ranges contain Paleozoic marine fossils from when the region was covered by ancient seas. The Escabrosa Limestone and Naco Formation yield abundant brachiopods, crinoids, corals, and trilobites. The Santa Catalina Mountains near Tucson offer hiking trails through fossil-bearing limestone.
California: Marine Reptiles and Mammoths
California's fossil heritage is dominated by marine fossils and Ice Age mammals rather than dinosaurs. The state's coastal ranges contain rich deposits of Mesozoic marine reptiles, including ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs that swam in the ancient Pacific.
The Anza-Borrego Desert State Park contains extensive deposits of Pliocene and Pleistocene fossils, including camels, saber-toothed cats, mammoths, and ancient horses. The park's Visitor Center displays impressive specimens, and the park allows supervised fossil hunting in designated areas during special programs.
For accessible fossil collecting, beaches along the central California coast yield marine fossils from the Monterey Formation, including whale bones, sand dollars, and shell fossils. The Sharktooth Hill Bone Bed near Bakersfield represents one of the richest concentrations of Miocene marine mammal and shark fossils in the world, though collecting requires special permission.
La Brea Tar Pits
The La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles preserve an extraordinary collection of Ice Age fossils from the last 50,000 years. Active excavations continue to uncover dire wolves, saber-toothed cats, mammoths, and even human remains trapped in the asphalt seeps. The museum allows visitors to watch paleontologists at work and showcases thousands of specimens.
Maryland: Coastal Fossil Hunting
Maryland's Calvert Cliffs along the Chesapeake Bay offer some of the East Coast's best fossil hunting opportunities. The Miocene-aged cliffs, formed 10-20 million years ago when the region was underwater, contain abundant shark teeth, whale bones, rays, crocodile remains, and countless shell fossils.
The Calvert Cliffs State Park features a two-mile trail to a beach where fossil collecting is permitted. After storms, freshly eroded fossils accumulate on the beach, including the highly sought-after teeth of the extinct giant shark Carcharocles megalodon, which could reach 60 feet in length.
For serious collectors, the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons provides identification help and displays spectacular local fossils including complete whale skeletons. The museum organizes fossil identification days where experts help identify your finds.
Fossil Hunting Tips for Maryland
The best time to hunt at Calvert Cliffs is after winter storms when erosion exposes fresh fossils. Look for dark-colored objects against the lighter sand, particularly near the cliff base. Always check tide schedules and never dig into the cliffs themselves, as they are unstable and protected.
Planning Your Fossil Hunting Adventure
Successful fossil hunting requires preparation and knowledge of regulations. On public lands, regulations vary significantly: national parks typically prohibit all collecting, while Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service lands may allow invertebrate fossil and petrified wood collection for personal use under specific limits.
Always research regulations before collecting and obtain required permits. Vertebrate fossils (bones of animals with backbones) are protected on federal lands and require scientific permits. Many states offer designated collecting areas where casual collecting is encouraged with basic rules.
Essential Equipment
For fossil hunting, bring a rock hammer or geology pick, safety goggles, sturdy gloves, brushes, newspaper for wrapping finds, and collection bags. A field guide to local fossils helps with identification. Always wear appropriate clothing for the environment, bring plenty of water, and let someone know your plans when exploring remote areas.
Best Seasons
Spring and fall generally offer the best conditions for fossil hunting in most states, with moderate temperatures and recent winter erosion exposing new specimens. Summer can be excellent for riverbed sites when water levels are low. Winter storms often create prime conditions for beach fossil hunting, though weather may be challenging.
Joining Organized Digs
Many museums and universities offer public dig programs where participants work with paleontologists at active research sites. These programs provide professional instruction, proper tools, and the thrill of potentially significant discoveries. Popular programs fill quickly, so book several months in advance for summer field seasons.
Frequently Asked Questions About 10 US States Where You Can Find Fossils and Dinosaur Tracks in 2025
Can you keep fossils you find on public land?
It depends on the land management agency and fossil type. On BLM and Forest Service lands, you can generally collect reasonable amounts of invertebrate fossils and petrified wood for personal use. Vertebrate fossils (bones) are protected and require scientific permits. National Parks prohibit all collecting. State parks have individual regulations. Always check specific rules before collecting.
What is the best state for finding dinosaur fossils?
Montana is considered the premier dinosaur fossil state, particularly for Late Cretaceous species like Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops. Utah runs a close second with exceptional Jurassic dinosaur sites. Wyoming, Colorado, and South Dakota also offer world-class dinosaur fossil localities with various levels of public access.
Where can you see actual dinosaur footprints?
Texas's Dinosaur Valley State Park offers some of the best dinosaur track viewing, with extensive sauropod and theropod trackways visible in the Paluxy River. Utah's St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site and Mill Canyon, Colorado's Dinosaur Ridge, and various sites in New Mexico also feature excellent preserved trackways that visitors can view and sometimes touch.
What time of year is best for fossil hunting?
Spring and fall typically offer the best conditions in most states, with moderate temperatures and recent winter erosion exposing fresh fossils. Summer is excellent for riverbed sites when water is low. Winter storms create prime beach fossil hunting conditions. Desert sites are best in cooler months to avoid extreme heat.
Do I need special permission to collect fossils?
Permission requirements vary by location and fossil type. Private land requires owner permission. Federal lands allow limited invertebrate fossil collecting without permits, but vertebrate fossils require scientific permits. Some states require collecting permits even on designated public lands. Commercial collecting always requires permits and agreements.
What are the most common fossils found by beginners?
Beginners most commonly find invertebrate marine fossils like brachiopods, crinoid stems, bryozoans, and ancient shells. Shark teeth are popular finds on beaches. Petrified wood is abundant in several western states. Fish fossils from Wyoming's Green River Formation are accessible through commercial quarries. These fossils are more abundant than dinosaur remains.
How do you identify fossils you find?
Use regional fossil field guides specific to the geological formation you're exploring. Many state geological surveys publish fossil guides. Museum visitor centers often provide identification assistance. Online fossil forums and apps like iNaturalist can help. Local rock and mineral clubs frequently have members experienced in fossil identification who welcome questions.
Are there places where you can dig for fossils with kids?
Yes, several family-friendly sites welcome kids: Wyoming's commercial fish fossil quarries, Texas's Mineral Wells Fossil Park, designated areas in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, and various museum dig programs designed for families. These sites provide tools, instruction, and safe environments where children can keep their finds.
