At the end of the day today the University of Wyoming Geological Museum is going to be closed. The museum and the paleontologists who worked there are victims of state budget cuts, and the spirited effort to keep the museum open did not get top-level administrators to change their minds. The closure of the museum is still a shock to paleontologist Brent Breithaupt, who worked hard to make it what it is now. He recently told the Laramie Boomerang:
I can't fathom the concept that I'm not going to be coming in every day to see the dinosaurs. ... I can't fathom the concept that the dinosaurs won't be there for other people to see; to see the little kids come in and be excited for the dinosaurs. I can't fathom the concept that this museum will not be there for them.
The museum will not be there for professors, university students, or state and federal agencies who regularly made use of it and Breithaupt's expertise, either.
What will become of the museum? It is difficult to say. Efforts are underway to secure private funding to reopen it sometime in the near future, but that is going to be a difficult task. You can keep up with the effort to re-open the museum at the Keep Laramie Dinos site.
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Sigh. I met some people in Istanbul who lamented that in their city of 10+ million, there was not one natural history museum, not one, and that as a result very, very few of their kids ever go through a 'dinosaur phase'. Awful.
Over three quarters of a million people have visited the creation "museum", while real museums are forced to close. A sad day for science, and for our country.