Hill City Loves Stan the T-Rex. So Does Google.

Dinosaurs have been a big deal in the Black Hills for, well, 200 million years, give or take. Really, all of western South Dakota, along with the plains and badlands in neighboring Wyoming and Montana, are part of one big fossil bed. All the fossils have to do with some really neat and nerdy geology which I can’t claim to understand, but it sounds awfully impressive.

The net result is a lot of excellent dinosaur skeletons and other fossils. Some of the more impressive fossils from the Black Hills and Badlands region end up around the world - like Sue, the largest, most complete and best-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton discovered to date, who is now on permanent display at The Field Museum in Chicago. Of course, many of the big finds stay here. Stan, uncovered by the same folks who found Sue, is on display at the Black Hills Museum of Natural History in Hill City.

Stan may not be as big as Sue, but he’s still pretty impressive, as the photo above shows. He’s one of the biggest T-rexes ever found, and the Black Hills Institute of Geology calls him “the largest and most complete T. rex available to science.” Stan’s coolness factor was high-profile enough to catch the attention of Google. The Rapid City Journal reported that the search giant approached the Black Hills Institute to purchase a replica, but in a move reminiscent of Bill Gates checking public vending machines for loose change, the $10.6 billion company thumbed their noses at the price and went elsewhere.

That fact seemed to have escaped The Atlantic Monthly, who reported in their December issue that a Stan replica now stands guard over Google’s Mountain View, Calif. campus. The case of mistaken identity is ruffling some feathers over copyright issues, but in the meantime, it’s a nice nod to Stan the man dino. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery, right? And Stan must be riding high. He even had a whole segment to himself on ABC’s Nightline earlier this week.

In the meantime, the real Stan is still hanging out in Hill City, along with a number of other impressive prehistoric friends. But Hill City’s just for starters. The Museum of Geology at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology in Rapid City, the Big Pig Dig in Badlands National Park, the Mammoth Site in Hot Springs, the Vore Buffalo Jump near Devils Tower and Rapid City’s Journey Museum round out a slew of paleontology sites in the area. There’s even a multi-day vacation package devoted to all the bones around the Black Hills.

So if your kids are in that crazy-for-dinosaurs stage - or if you never outgrew it - there should be more than enough dino-seeing in the Black Hills to keep you busy for a few days.