A rockhounding trip with his grandparents turned into a paleontological find for 11-year-old Touren Pope, of Nevada, after he spotted an odd-looking piece of shell weathering out of a badlands outcrop on public land in southwest Wyoming last fall. The fossil, later excavated by museum staff and dated to roughly 48 million years old, turned out to be the nearly complete upper shell of an ancient soft-shelled turtle. Touren named it “Little Timmy.”
The discovery, first detailed by the Bureau of Land Management in a blog post published in January, took place on BLM-managed ground in the Greater Green River Basin, within the area overseen by the agency’s Rock Springs Field Office. The rock exposed at the site belongs to the Bridger Formation, a sequence of Eocene-epoch sediment layers in southwest Wyoming long known to paleontologists for well-preserved fossils of early mammals, turtles, and other vertebrates that lived roughly 46 to 50 million years ago.
A small section of shell, barely exposed
According to Cowboy State Daily, Touren was rockhounding with his grandparents, Patti and Tom Patterson, in September when he noticed a section of shell only a couple of inches across protruding from the eroding badlands. He didn’t pry the object loose himself — he reported the find to the BLM, as federal regulations require for vertebrate fossils discovered on public land. That decision is what allowed the specimen to be properly documented and excavated rather than lost to informal collecting.
The BLM’s Rock Springs Field Office paleontology staff was notified, and Touren and his grandparents guided agency staff back to the site for an initial assessment. The agency then brought in JP Cavigelli, a museum collections specialist at the Tate Geological Museum at Casper College, as the permitted paleontologist authorized to collect the specimen.
The formal excavation took place in September 2025. Cavigelli led a crew that included Tate Geological Museum volunteers Steve Felto and Judith Johnston, with Touren and his grandparents present throughout. Cowboy State Daily reported that the team encased the fossil in plaster-soaked burlap strips, a standard field-jacketing technique used to stabilize delicate specimens for transport, in less than two hours. Touren served as Cavigelli’s primary assistant during the process, a hands-on role the BLM’s account frames as recognition for reporting the find.
What the fossil is — and isn’t, yet
Once exposed, the specimen turned out to be the carapace, or upper shell, of a soft-shelled turtle belonging to the trionychid family. Both the BLM and Cowboy State Daily describe it as nearly complete and well preserved, with the shell’s texture suggesting it had only recently been uncovered by erosion. Cavigelli told Cowboy State Daily that little of the shell had weathered away, estimating the exposure at roughly the equivalent of “two rainstorms” worth of erosion. “Finding a complete soft shell is pretty cool,” he said.
Softshell turtles, distinguished by their leathery rather than hard, keratin-covered shells, were common inhabitants of the rivers and floodplains that once crossed the Green River Basin. The BLM’s account describes the region during the Eocene as a warm, near-tropical floodplain environment threaded with rivers and streams — conditions that left behind extensive fossil beds in the Bridger and neighboring formations. Multiple trionychid species are known from these deposits, and both the BLM and Cowboy State Daily note that the specimen has not yet been assigned to a particular species; that identification awaits further laboratory preparation and study.
Speaking to Wyoming Public Media, Touren described the moment of discovery in characteristically understated terms: “Then I just spot this weird rock that I thought I just wanted to throw it up into the air. So instead, I didn’t — I found a fossilized turtle.” In the same interview, he traced his interest in the past to how earlier people made and built things, saying he’s drawn to eras when “they were able to build things out of wood that actually looked cool, worked better, and harder to be destroyed and easier to be fixed.”
Where the fossil goes next
Because the discovery was made on land managed by the BLM, the fossil itself remains public property. Following excavation, it was transported to the Tate Geological Museum, which the BLM has approved as a repository for vertebrate fossils collected on the agency’s Wyoming land. There, staff are cleaning, stabilizing, and preparing the shell for further research and eventual public viewing. Museum staff have discussed the possibility of eventually displaying “Little Timmy” alongside an existing Cretaceous-age soft-shell turtle specimen already in the museum’s collection, according to Cowboy State Daily, and have invited the Pope-Patterson family to visit.
Photographs distributed with the BLM’s account and picked up by regional outlets show the shell during museum preparation with a small toy placed beside it, a common paleontological convention used to give viewers an immediate, informal sense of the specimen’s size before formal scale bars or measurements are published.
The find has drawn attention less for its rarity as a fossil — trionychid turtle shells are not uncommon in the Bridger Formation — than for the example it sets in fossil stewardship. Vertebrate fossils on federal land are protected under U.S. law: the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act and its implementing regulations bar anyone from collecting a vertebrate fossil off public land without a permit, which in practice means a finder is expected to report the discovery to the managing agency rather than collect or sell it privately. The BLM’s write-up of the discovery frames Touren’s choice to report the shell, and to walk agency staff back to the exact spot, as the reason the fossil could be properly excavated, identified, and preserved for research — avoiding the damage or loss that comes with unauthorized removal.
For now, “Little Timmy” remains in preparation at the Tate Geological Museum, with its precise species identity still an open question for researchers to resolve. The broader Green River Basin, meanwhile, continues to give up fossils from the humid floodplain world that existed there some 48 million years ago, offering paleontologists — and, on occasion, sharp-eyed 11-year-olds — a window into an Eocene Wyoming that looked nothing like the high desert basin visible today.
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