Dispatch: Wyoming's chunkiest "squid butt" ever found is named for the Linster family. The Ten Sleep man who found it didn't live to see it.

Dispatch, we have the chunkiest squid butt on record. Researchers writing in Papers in Paleontology have named a new belemnite, an extinct squid relative, Wyoteuthis linsterorum, Cowboy State Daily reports. It lived about 160 million years ago in the Middle Jurassic, when Wyoming sat under warm, shallow seawater. Belemnites grew a cone-shaped shell inside their bodies, called a rostrum by paleontologists and a squid butt by most Wyomingites, and it's usually the only part that fossilizes. Wyoming has them by the millions. This one is different. The two known specimens, found near Ten Sleep and Thermopolis in the Bighorn Basin, have rostrums almost 6 inches long and around 2 inches thick, the thickest known belemnite rostra ever found. With head and tentacles, the whole animal would have been nearly two feet long, the largest known belemnite species from the Jurassic. "It sticks out like a sore thumb," said co-author Bill Wahl. The name honors the Linster family. Cliff Linster found the type specimen in the hills near Ten Sleep and donated it to the Wyoming Dinosaur Center Foundation in 2019. He passed away June 10 at 82. "Just the day before he passed away, he and my mom were driving up to that same ridge where he found that belemnite," said his son, Wes. "He was always game to go out looking for fossils right up to the very end." Both specimens are on display at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis, and since invertebrate fossils can be legally collected on federal land, the next big one could be found by anybody. A man spends his life walking ridges, and a ridge gives back a giant with his family's name on it. Fair trade. Over.