Local dinosaur hunters bring bones back to the Flathead

Aamon Jaeger’s friends and family tried to dissuade him when he started buying land in Arizona, site-unseen, off of eBay in the hopes of finding petrified wood.

“It was cheap kind of desert land, but there’s fossils. So for someone like us, it could be a gold mine, it could be really fun,” Jaeger said. 

Jaeger started out as a tattoo artist at Tree of Life Tattoo in Whitefish with a fossil-hunting passion. A decade ago, he started with 10 acres of unfarmable, dry land with hardly a road to it in Arizona. Now, after years of digging and the purchase of a total 480 acres, he has brought his third large invertebrate find back to his home state of Montana. 

Aamon and his wife Chantel Jaeger are the owners of NorthWest Montana Fossils, started in 2018. They lease property in the Two Medicine formation area to hunt for dinosaurs, their biggest find being the bottom half of a hypacrosaur, a 29-foot long duck-billed dinosaur. In Arizona, the Jaegers’ property has produced a 30-foot petrified tree, as well as a 75% complete phytosaur, a sort of tall alligator-like creature that was an ancestor to the dinosoaurs. 

This winter on his property in Arizona, Jaeger and his father were searching on the hillside. Ninety feet up, they found another phytosaur, but this time, it had a companion. Nestled together with this apex predator was its prey – an aetosaur, an herbivore reminiscent of a giant lizardy armadillo with plates down its back. 

It’s hard to tell how these two creatures ended up in the same grave. 

“But it shows the coexistence of this ecosystem and that is absolutely incredible for these ancient animals,” Aamon explained. “After 210 million years, to find anything even close to this is a huge homerun.”

It is a tradition in paleontology to name your finds. This phytosaur will be called Lencho, Aamon’s father’s nickname. The aetosaur is still unnamed. 

As Aamon and his digging partners began to uncover the bones, they worked carefully and quickly as possible to dig around them without disturbing their position. Once exposed to the elements, fossilized bone deteriorates quickly. They can only last a few years in the open, as compared to 210 million underground. To keep them safe in the process, paleontologists will cover the area the bones are in with plaster and tin foil, slowly digging down around the site and enclosing the bones with a cushion of dirt in a “jacket.”

“It’s like giant paper mache that we’re doing in the field. And then it’s safer to flip, and it’s so hard that nothing gets damaged,” Chantel said. 

“In this case, you don’t really know what you have until you get it home…you can’t really expose the bone in the field,“ Aamon added. 

The Jaegers used a backhoe and wench to slowly guide the fossils down the hill and into their truck before driving them back to their shop on Lake Blaine Road outside of Creston, where they have been meticulously working to clean up the specimen. They expect it will take a year to carefully clean each bone and create a 3D grid map of their positions. All of the dirt is saved, so that when it is passed on to other paleontologists, they can do a fluval study of the waterbed the fossils were found in and better help tell its story. 

While they are currently under an NDA, the Jaegers were excited to announce that their find will go on to a large natural history museum as a diagnostic study piece, set to be unveiled in 2025. 

Until then, locals can see the bones on display at the Jaeger’s Kalispell Rock Shop at 103 East Cottonwood Drive in Evergreen. They will be available for viewing starting June 11 until the end of July, when paperwork with the museum is expected to go through. Hours are Monday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.