MEDICINE BOW, Wyo. -- Out here under a wide Western sky where more antelope than people still roam, dinosaur bones hundreds of millions of years old poke out of the rolling range land.

This is where Chinese laborers, fresh from laying track for the transcontinental railroad, found some of the first dinosaur fossils on Como Ridge in 1877 and shipped them back East by the rail line they helped build.

It's where competing paleontologists fought often fatal "bone wars" during the 1880s over fossils in high demand by museums.

And it's where Andrew Carnegie's researchers in 1899 unearthed the nearly intact fossilized skeleton of a 70-foot-long Diplodocus carnegii, nicknamed "Dippy," that was long the main attraction of the Carnegie Museum's Dinosaur Hall.

This also is where University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Museum paleontologists, geologists, archaeologists, biologists and administrators traveled this week to inspect a hilly swath of scrub grass and prairie pasture that the university recently acquired, and that will soon become the newest dig site in a fossil-rich Jurassic landscape known for more than a century as "the dinosaur graveyard."

The 4,700-acre parcel, just 15 miles southeast of Como Ridge as the pterodactyl flies, was deeded to Pitt in December by Allen Cook, a 58-year-old Louisiana native who is one of the biggest cattle ranchers in Wyoming.

Mr. Cook, whose ranch sprawls over 117,000 acres in southeast Wyoming's Laramie Plains Basin, 80 miles northwest of Cheyenne, said the land Pitt acquired has been used to graze cattle for decades but its dinosaur fossils were found only recently and haven't been quarried or developed.

"This site was not known for its fossils until around 1999 and because of its recent discovery, has a lot of value for study that the older, more well-known sites don't," Mr. Cook said.

In addition to its dinosaur fossils, Pitt's acquisition is noteworthy for its animal and plant biodiversity, archaeology, and geomorphology -- the science that deals with the relief features of the earth -- including rock arches, caves and Native American petroglyphs and settlements. The land also contains the historic headquarters, barns and outbuildings of the 3.5 million-acre Swan Land and Cattle Co., which was founded in 1885 by Scottish investors and grew to be the world's largest cattle ranch.

"Pitt's land has some springs on it that for 11,000 years the indigenous people of this area used pretty much continuously until the white man came," Mr. Cook said. "Then Swan ran it from 1800 into the 1940s. It's only been owned by four other people and very few folks have seen it."

That freshness makes it attractive to researchers and holds potential for new discoveries in a wide range of academic disciplines.

Pitt and Carnegie Museum researchers and officials toured the parcel for three days this week. The Pittsburgh team did not respond to requests for information about the visit.

They were joined by representatives from the University of Wyoming, which will partner with the Pittsburgh institutions to establish scientific and educational programs at the site.

"This is an opportunity to sit down and talk, in many cases for the first time, about what it is everybody is going to do out there," said Brent Breithaupt, curator of the University of Wyoming's Geological Museum in Laramie, who was on the tour. "There's interest by paleontologists, anthropologists, geologists, biologists and agriculture -- many, many researchers will be involved."

He said it will take another year at least until plans are in place and development of the site can commence.

Visitors this week saw the springs and teepee rings, and on Thursday saw a length of dinosaur vertebrae protruding from an outcrop of the 150 million year-old Morrison Formation, the Jurassic-age sedimentary layer that also is exposed along the northern side of Como Ridge, where most of the earlier fossil finds occurred.

"As we saw Thursday, there are still lots of bones at the surface and, as indicated by those vertebrae, more of that dinosaur in the hillside to dig out. The site has good exposures, good-looking bones, but we've only touched the tip."

The Pitt property also may hold outcroppings of the Sundance Formation, valued for Mesozoic marine animal fossils, and the Cloverly Formation, in which the smaller Deinonychus dinosaur fossils were recently discovered.

This southeast corner of the nation's least populous state is so rich in dinosaur fossils because 150 million years ago Wyoming was prime dinosaur habitat, and because since that time the Earth's sedimentary layers have folded in ways to make the dinosaur bones accessible to paleontologists.

"In Jurassic times this was just a great place to be a dinosaur," Mr. Breithaupt said. "They lived, died and were buried here in great numbers."

While the Morrison Formation has exposures in 11 Western states, Wyoming's Como Ridge area dinosaur fossils are by far the most famous because they were discovered just as the West was opened up by the transcontinental railroad.

"The Morrison doesn't crop out in the East, so when the bones were discovered and the railroad came through just a mile to the north, Wyoming dinosaurs became world famous," Mr. Breithaupt said. "They were new in the East and museums at Yale, in New York, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and the Smithsonian in Washington, all wanted to put them on display."

Pittsburgh's historic role in dinosaur fossil collecting also helped persuade Mr. Cook to consider deeding his land there, even though he has no ties to Pitt. The land is valued at between $5 million and $7 million. Discussions leading to transfer of the property to Pitt took five years.

"I wanted the University of Wyoming to be involved but Pitt brought more to the table from a financial standpoint," said Mr. Cook. "And certainly people relate dinosaurs to Carnegie and I liked that too."

On State Route 30, just outside Medicine Bow, Les Germain, who once took anthropology classes at Pitt and now runs the Fossil Cabin Museum at Como Bluff, said Pitt got a good dinosaur bone site, but no better than some others along the Como Ridge.

"Because the mass of digs went from west to east along the ridge, they never got to Cook's ranch," Mr. Germain said. "There's probably lots of good stuff buried there, but it's the same thing you can find in other places, just a little less busy."

Standing in the middle of the museum, which lives up to its 1953 billing in Ripley's Believe It Or Not as the "oldest house in the world" because it was built in 1939 using 5,796 dinosaur bones, Mr. Germain said the Smithsonian carted truckloads of bones off the ridge and surrounding areas in the 1950s but there are still plenty left.

"That ridge runs for 9¹/₂ miles and there are enough bones left for every man, woman and child to have one like this," he said, picking up a knee joint fossil the size of a softball from an ancient buffalo-like animal. "Dinosaur bones are as common as dandelions out there."