Twelve years ago, a team of paleontologists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison discovered a set of fossils outside Dubois in a layer of rock known as the Popo Agie Formation. They spent over a decade analyzing and studying them and published their findings in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society at the start of 2025.
Come to find out, they’d found the oldest known dinosaur in North America! Ahvaytum bahndooiveche lived around 230 million years ago, stood a little taller than a chicken and sported a long tail.
The discovery challenges long-held narratives about the history of dinosaurs, providing evidence that the creatures were present in the northern half of the planet much earlier than was previously thought.
The team collaborated with members of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe and students from the Fort Washakie School to honor the fact that Ahvaytum bahndooiveche was found on the tribe’s ancestral lands. Now it’s the first dinosaur named in the Shoshone language and tribal members Amanda LeClair-Diaz, Lynette St.Clair, Joshua Mann and Reba Teran are listed as co-authors on the published paper.
The group also worked together to name a new amphibian species that was found in the same area as Ahvaytum bahndooiveche. Teran named the salamanders Ninumbeehan dookoodukah, two Shoshone words that mean “The Little People” and “Flesh Eater.”
Wyoming Public Radio’s Hannah Habermann talked about the dinosaur project with Eastern Shoshone elder Reba Jo Teran and Dave Lovelace, a research scientist at the University of Wisconsin Geology Museum.
Editor’s Note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Dave Lovelace: When we were looking for fossils, we started finding some pretty spectacular things right away. We were really excited about it. We were in the process of writing these stories up for publication and we realized that a lot of the specimens needed to have new scientific names.
It's a pretty traditional scientific methodology and I was following that, and it was students that were starting to talk to me about, “Hey, why do we do it this way?” And as soon as they start looking at it, I'm like, “Well, yeah, we're writing in Latin because the people that taught me told me to, but we don't have to.”
This is really silly. It's not representative, it's not in any way creating new [information] or sharing information in a different way.
I ended up reaching out to the Director of Native Relations on the University of Wisconsin campus. He connected us with the THPO [Tribal Historic Preservation] offices on the Wind River Reservation.
Josh Mann, the THPO director, hooked us up with the Fort Washakie schools with Lynette St.Clair, and Lynette brought in Reba, and there was another elder, John Washakie, who was in the field with us.
So it was just this process of us talking about it. It took a year or more for us to get to know each other and kind of understand where everybody's coming from and ended up taking a field trip.
So that's the broad story of how we got where we are.
Hannah Habermann: Reba, you've been working on a dictionary of Eastern Shoshone words for a long time. What's that been like and how did you get involved in this dinosaur project?
Reba Jo Teran: Yeah, I was contacted by Lynette St. Clair, and I worked with my sister Beatrice [on the dictionary]. She's 86 now, 16 years older than me, but she was fluent. When I was the [Eastern Shoshone] Cultural Director in 2002, we started recording our language. Me and Beatrice have been working on it 23 years now and we've recorded about 24,000 words now. Manfred sadly passed away, but he was Lynette's brother. But he was fluent, that’s why I was working with him.
I was fluent up until I was six. Then I didn't hear it all through school and stuff. [But] as I worked with them, I started to become fluent again, working with it every day and for years, and soon I was dreaming in Shoshone. It took about six years of dreaming it and I was fluent in my dreams.
Then one morning, I just snapped and I was speaking and conversational and thinking in it. So that's why I ended up being an elder in the language, and they consider me a fluent speaker, the community.
HH: Reba, what were you thinking about when you were naming this dinosaur?
RT: Manfred was the one that told us that they called them the “Ahvaytum bahndooiveche.” “Ahvayt” means “long ago.” You can like “ah-vayt,” or you can hold it out “ah—vayt” if you're a storyteller. You'd start out, “ah—vayt,” you drag it on for how long it was.
“Bahndooiveche.” “Bahn” means water, and “dooiveche” means “young handsome men.” I asked Manfred, “How come they called them young handsome men?”
He said, “You think about it, in nature you find male birds, they're real pretty and bright colors and like a yellow headed black bird will have a real bright yellow head. But the females were kind of drab, like a mallard duck. The female was drab looking. And Creator, the person who made all of us, our people, and the earth, he was protecting the females. Because we're the ones that had the babies and protected the eggs. So the males were the target of hunters. They attracted the attention to protect the females, and that's how Creator made the world.”
HH: Dave, what did this process of bringing people together look like on the ground?
DL: One of the things that we did with the Fort Washakie students, we took the 7th grade cohort of 2022 out to the field. That's where Reba joined us, as well as some of the other educators, [like] Josh Mann and John Washakie. We were there to show the students the sites where these animals were found, both the dinosaur and the little amphibian that both received names and honor in the Shoshone language.
That process [of] working with the students was really powerful for me because we got to tell our story and as scientists, that's what we do. We go out and we look at things and we make up a story that represents whatever it is that we're observing.
But learning and listening to the stories and [especially] how Reba spoke about being respectful and how to treat the land and how to honor the Little People, this was really powerful for us because it's not something that we had heard before.
We took that on and incorporated that information ourselves into how we do field work now. Because when we go to new sites, there's been times that other elders have offered to come out to bless the sites and really just to say some words. We're trying to show that we're coming with a good intent to tell a story and not just to rip something out of the ground, because we are violating the earth when we go in to do this. If we can understand that we're doing that and try to approach it with a degree of humility and honor and understanding, it has more meaning and impact, in the larger sense of science itself.
It's meaningful to the community, it’s meaningful to us as the folks coming in and doing this, because it gives a little bit more depth to it. It's not just a fossil that comes out. It actually has more of a story and more of a context behind it that has a cultural importance. I think that's something we don't recognize as often as we should in the sciences.
HH: One word that really comes up for me listening to you both is reciprocity. What do you hope reciprocity looks like moving forward in this merging of two different ways of knowing?
DL: Reciprocity is a mutual exchange and I think that that's a powerful thing and it has been overlooked for far too long. I hope that projects like these are able to move the bar and say this should be more of the norm. Wherever you're working in the world, there are people that know things, and to communicate with them and share your insights and your information because you can see connections on both sides that aren't seen if you aren't talking.
RT: I know the science part is important. On the internet, I've researched birds. People have studied them and it takes time. I don't have time to study all the birds or even know what they all look like or how many there are or about their characteristics.
But on the internet, I found a site that did have it written. So we recorded all of that in our language, totally in Shoshone. It is important to have science, and now with technology helping me, and the work Dave and them are doing. As long as things are done respectfully, I think our two worlds can help each other.
