KEMMERER, WYOMING — A six-foot-tall plastic Tyrannosaurus rex stands guard outside Robert Bowen’s fossil shop on Pine Street in downtown, Kemmerer, Wyo., in the state’s southwest corner.“One of the fun things about some of the fossils is, they tell stories,” Bowen said, pointing to a fossilized stingray hanging on the shop wall. The beautifully preserved disc-shaped skeleton has a chunk missing from its left side.“He got a little too close to a turtle or an alligator,” he explained. “You can see the elongated bite mark.”The town of Kemmerer calls itself “Wyoming’s Aquarium in Stone.” Quarries just outside town yield schools of fossilized fish with just a few taps of a chisel. A freshwater lake covered the region 50 million years ago.The backbone of the town’s economy, however, is a different kind of fossil: fossil fuel. A coal mine feeds the Naughton Power Plant just outside town.“It’s huge for us, as far as our economy,” said Bowen, who sits on the town council. The plant and the mine provide about 400 jobs and the bulk of the tax base in the town of about 3,000 people.So it sent a shudder through the community late last year when FILE – A dump truck hauls coal at Contura Energy’s Eagle Butte Mine near Gillette, Wyo., March 28, 2017. Mine owner Blackjewel says it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It operates mines in Wyoming, Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia.Wyoming reactsWyoming has not embraced the energy transition. Environmental arguments for zero-emission wind and solar power don’t get much traction. The state has the Adaptation or extinctionRobert Bowen said the new law will help the town buy time. But he acknowledges that trouble is coming.“It’s not ‘if,’ it’s ‘when,’” he said. “To prevent some of that, we need to start looking at diversifying our economy here.”Tourism is one option. Painted wooden signs around town point to the region’s attractions: boating, snowmobiling and, of course, fossils. One sign proclaims Kemmerer the “World Fossil Capital.”“One of the things that we could be pushing a lot harder is paleo tourism,” Bowen said. The town could do more to promote fossil safaris out to the nearby quarries, where visitors can easily find their own fossils to take home.Fossil tourism alone won’t save the town, he said, but it would help. The best option would be some kind of manufacturing, he added.Like the creatures entombed in stone here, Kemmerer must adapt or go extinct.
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