Paleontologists and scientists at the museum and the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in Hill City, S.D. have worked tirelessly for three years to collect, clean and preserve artifacts designed to give visitors a look at how life evolved beginning 25 billion years ago.

“You’ll actually be able to touch a fossil that’s 3.5 billion years old,” Robert Bakker, the museum’s curator of paleontology, says in a conspiratorial whisper. “A microbe, simpler than bacteria, which had in its DNA the kernel that would flower later on into dinosaurs, mammals, than us. That’s the beginning of the safari.”

His long white beard and locks bobbing with all-too-obvious excitement, Bakker raises his brows below his cowboy hat as he continues to describe the journey visitors will experience when they enter “The Prehistoric Safari,” expected to be among the top six dinosaur exhibits in the United States.

Jack Horner, curator of the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Mont., who acted, along with Bakker, as an adviser on the Jurassic Park movie series, agreed there will be some unique and exclusive items on display in Houston, including Triceratops skin. But he said that to him, an object’s value is determined by science and should always be peer-reviewed before being displayed.

“Anybody can have stuff,” Horner said, adding that he is curious to see the scientific findings on the items displayed in Houston. “Opinions are cheap.”

Bakker says the safari is designed to teach about evolution. Visitors, he explains, will experience the Cambrian explosion, when life went from “literally slime” into “beautiful, elegantly sculptured things, the trilobites, which are gorgeous.”

These bizarre, insect-like creatures, which are sometimes horned or sporting antennae, roamed the Earth’s seas in the Paleozoic era before the dinosaurs and were one of the most complex living things that existed to that point. At the Houston museum, visitors will be treated to one of the largest displays of trilobite fossils in the world, and Bakker rubs his hands with enthusiasm at the thought of young children pressing their nose to the glass to get a glimpse or reaching a tiny finger out to touch an impossibly old piece of rock.

“Dinosaurs are the jumper cables to the human mind. Kids can’t curb their enthusiasm when they’re in a hall of dinosaurs and mammoths and mammoth hunters and trilobites and giant fish that could chomp up a shark. These natural objects in motion and context make kids want to read, you can’t stop them from reading and thinking,” said Bakker, who in the 1970s was one of the first to argue the massive prehistoric beasts were warm-blooded and further challenged scientific thinking in his 1986 book “The Dinosaur Heresies.”

For scientists, and the museum community, the exhibit offers unique objects, including the only Triceratops skin found to date, a specimen that showed they had been wrong in believing the horned vegetarians had smooth skin. In fact, it had bristles, Bakker said.

Then there is the museum’s skeleton of a T. rex, one of only two with complete hands, two long fingers and one stub, which Bakker believes could be proof this massive, feared predator also had a soft side. The fingers, too small and badly configured, wouldn’t have helped in hunting, or even grabbing things, leaving Bakker and other paleontologists to believe they were for tickling, fondling and even falling in love. The fossil also has a piece of its tail missing, likely because it was bitten off by another Tyrannosaurus Rex.

The hall also will house the world’s only complete fossil of a snake-type creature from 50 million years ago, said David Temple, the museum’s associate curator of paleontology. The snake is related to the constrictor, and the only other fossil of this type disappeared about 60 years ago.

Original sculptures, paintings and murals will depict scenes scientists and paleontologists believe occurred based on the fossil evidence, Temple said. And there are creatures native to Texas, including a Glyptodon, an Ice Age, armadillo-type creature the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, and one of the best preserved fin-backed reptiles that preceded the dinosaurs.

“This is what life was like at the beginning of natural history,” Temple said.

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“Since we’ve gotten rain and everything, the price has really jumped up,” said John Dixon, a rancher near Elkhart, who with a slight nod of his head bought a $7,000 cow. “They sold at a pretty good level all the way through.”

Last year’s historic drought forced ranchers to cut their herds because they had no grass and couldn’t afford high hay prices. Hundreds of thousands of cattle were slaughtered or sent out of the state, leaving Texas, the largest livestock producer in the nation, with its smallest herd since the 1950s.

Then, after a year of record-breaking heat and an almost complete lack of rain, winter rains broke records. Ponds filled. The grass turned green. Ranchers began looking for cattle, and many — along with analysts, feedlots and livestock dealers — kept a close eye on the GeneTrust auction held in the rolling hills of East Texas on a ranch owned by the Cavenders, a family more often known for selling boots and hats in western stores than cattle genetics.

“The big question looming in everybody’s mind now is: Are we going to have another summer like we had last summer?” explained Doak Lambert, the auctioneer. “If I go and invest all this money and buy these cattle and pay a premium for them, and then we end up in a drought situation again this summer and I have to liquidate them, where do I sit financially? So there’s a lot of risk involved right now.”

Yet “the mood is good,” Lambert added. “The American cattleman is, I guess, the biggest risk-taker I know, and he’s also the biggest optimist I know.”

Jason Cleere, a rancher and beef cattle specialist with Texas AgriLife Extension at Texas A&M University, believes that while ranchers are restocking, they remain cautious. The rains have slowed significantly in the past month, and many ranchers are heeding climatologists’ warnings that the next decade in Texas will be relatively dry. They’re keeping herds small so they’re better prepared for the next, inevitable, dry spell.

“Ranchers in general have been a little bit more conservative on going out and rebuilding because they want to see what happens as we move into the summer,” Cleere said. “Ranchers went through a lot of cash reserves last summer, and they can’t do that again this year.”

With cattle prices high, cash reserves low, the weather uncertain and calves taking nine months to be born and several years to be ready for slaughter, many estimate the beef industry may need five years to fully recover.

It’s a layered business. There are those who raise cattle for breeding. They sell to ranchers who raise cattle for beef and breed their herds to restock. Livestock dealers buy cattle from those ranchers and sell the animals to feedlots, where they are fattened up before heading to slaughterhouses.

The drought impacts each differently.

Mary Lou Bradley raises bulls in the Texas Panhandle town of Memphis to sell to ranchers for breeding. She spent more than $100,000 on hay to keep her animals fed during the drought, which is still gripping her area, and now she’s looking for new markets. Her Bradley 3 Ranch sold a number of bulls this year in Florida, Colorado and Missouri, but because Texas has relatively few cows left, there was little need there for males for breeding.

Bradley has been keeping an eye on bull sales and hoping for a turnaround. Some saw record prices. At other auctions, barely anyone showed up. Some were cancelled because ranchers feared they would not have buyers, she said.

“People are not buying back yet,” Bradley said, noting that sales in Nebraska, Montana and other states that have had good rain have been better than in Texas. Even in western Oklahoma, which has largely recovered from the drought, ranchers remain nervous.

Many who are buying animals now are putting out money with the hope that they’ll make it back in a few years if beef prices remain high.

Dealers are doing better. Jim Schwertner, president of Capitol Land and Livestock, had a 25 percent increase in business last year as ranchers sold off animals at the height of the drought. He’s still buying now, about 3,000 head of cattle a day that he turns around in 24 hours. With solid demand for meat and a relatively low supply of cattle, beef prices are up, and he expects them to stay that way.

“You’ll see a three year process before we can normalize the supply,” Schwertner said. “It’s three years from the time you buy a cow and a bull before you get that steak on your table.”

And it will certainly be more expensive.

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The contentious pipeline is designed to bring oil from Canada’s tar sands region in Alberta to refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast. The upper portion of the pipeline requires U.S. State Department approval because it crosses an international border, while the southern tier will need standard federal permits that Pourbaix believes will be ready shortly.

The State Department, backed by President Barack Obama, recently rejected the longer project, saying TransCanada needed to find a route that would avoid the Sandhills and the Ogallala Aquifer, a key water source for eight states. At the time, Obama encouraged TransCanada to pursue the southern portion of the pipeline that would, in the short term, relieve a bottleneck of crude at Midwestern refineries.

Pourbaix said that part of the pipeline would be ready by 2013.

“We’ll be taking care of that bottleneck between Cushing and the Gulf Coast,” Pourbaix told reporters after speaking on a panel at a Houston energy conference.

That southern tier, he added, would relieve the problem only in the short term. Having that portion ready in advance will also not shorten the two-year construction timeline for the longer pipeline, Pourbaix said, due to the severe winters in the northern United States that prevent construction during those months.

In the long term, Canada wants to get more oil to market. Without the longer Keystone pipeline that isn’t possible. Pourbaix said as long as Keystone is completed by 2015, the prospects for other alternative western routes that would instead take the product to China and the Far East are not likely to get approved.

Right now, Pourbaix believes Keystone XL can meet the 2015 deadline despite the permitting delays. He said the company is working closely with the Nebraska government to find new routes and has identified several corridors that will be made public in a few weeks.

It appears the new plan will require about 20 miles of additional pipe, and about a 100-mile to 110-mile reroute around the Sandhills, Pourbaix said.

“Imagine a jog around the Sandhills,” he said. “We’re talking about a relatively modest jog around the Sandhills.”

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