Sorry, But Wyoming’s “Oldest Building On Earth” Is A Lie

There is a building in Wyoming that was called "The oldest building in the world" when it was completed.

But it's not.

I'll explain why in a moment.

It was built as a roadside tourist attraction on America's first coast-to-coast highway.

The Fossil Cabin in Wyoming is sometimes called the world's oldest building because it's made of fossilized dinosaur bones.

Thomas Boylan built the cabin in 1932 on a remote stretch of Wyoming Highway 30, between Rock River and Medicine Bow.

There is a plan to move the cabin to Medicine Bow. Work started a couple of years ago but stalled out.

Boylan had homesteaded the property in 1908 and collected dinosaur bones from Como Bluff with the intention of building a skeleton as a roadside attraction.

However, he found it too difficult to sort the bones into a single skeleton, so he built the cabin instead.

The cabin is made of 5,796 dinosaur bones from a variety of species, along with some rock, and weighs 102,116 pounds.

That's all very unique and impressive.

But that does not make it "THE OLDEST BUILDING IN THE WORLD."

WHY NOT? You might be wondering.

If I were to build a house out of granite, that would be much older than dinosaur bones.

Most any stone-built house is older than these dino bones.

The oldest in-place Earth rock is thought to be from the Acasta Gneiss in the Canadian Shield. Scientists use dating techniques on the zircon crystals in the rock, determining the age of this rock to be about 4.0 billion years.

If I built a house out of Acasta Gneiss, it would be the oldest house on Earth.

What they should call this unique Wyoming house is "The Only House Built from Dino Bones". That's unique enough.