Saving Peck’s Rex | University of Notre Dame

During his excursions to northeastern Montana, Rigby was often joined by Notre Dame students and adult volunteers, usually under the auspices of Earthwatch, a group based in Watertown, Massachusetts, that matches amateur scientists with projects conducted by researchers in a variety of fields including paleontology who need both financing and labor.

Rigby had received support from Earthwatch since 1988, with some 420 volunteers having joined him in the desert badlands near Fort Peck. After finding a large area with the bones of a hadrosaur in the summer of 1996, Rigby and his team returned a year later to dig deeper. (In the interest of safety, security and science, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which now manages the area, asked that the exact location of Rigby’s fieldwork…