The House Built From Thousands of Dinosaur Bones
The strange place you can still visit today
Fossil Cabin is located outside of the tiny town of Medicine Bow, Wyoming. It has been dubbed the oldest building in the world by some due to the fact that it is made of thousands of dinosaur bones that date back millions of years. The cabin was built as a roadside attraction in 1932 and is the result of the massive amount of dinosaur bones available in this area of the United States.
When people started settling in the western half of North America, they made an astonishing discovery. Dinosaur bones were not only abundant; they were so numerous that they were excavated in literal piles. When homesteaders started digging in the ground looking for building materials and gold or constructing root cellars, basements and foundations, they hit loads of unearthed reptilian bones.
The Fossil Cabin was built by homesteader Thomas Boylan who dug up thousands of individual bones over the course of 17 years. At first, he wanted to try and reconstruct the dinosaurs that he was uncovering, but he quickly realized he had a problem. He had too many bones.
There was no way for him to accurately rebuild the dinosaur skeletons. He had no way of knowing if his bones went together or if any of the bones were even from the same…
