Manhattan, Montana

Bozeman sits in the Gallatin Valley with mountains in every direction, a college town and a northern gateway toward Yellowstone, roughly eighty miles from the park's north entrance. Its showpiece is the Museum of the Rockies, affiliated with Montana State University and the Smithsonian, and it holds one of the finest dinosaur collections in the country, including the largest assemblage of Tyrannosaurus rex specimens in the United States, around thirteen of them. For decades the museum was led by famed paleontologist Jack Horner, whose work on dinosaur growth and behavior reshaped the science (and who consulted on the Jurassic Park films). On display is 'Montana's T. rex,' one of the most complete skeletons ever found, dug from the badlands near Fort Peck. Between the fossils, the peaks, and the road to Yellowstone, Bozeman packs a lot of wonder into one valley.