Equally grounded in past and future, Denver science buff Greg Tally is no technological dinosaur.

He loves social networking as much as paleontology, and he discovered that the Web cartoon “The Oatmeal” was fundraising for a museum dedicated to scientist Nikola Tesla either through his Facebook wall or the tech website “Mashable” — he doesn’t quite remember.

Tally donated $35,000 to the social-media campaign that raised nearly $1.4 million from people in more than 100 countries to preserve the scientist’s Wardenclyffe lab in Shorham, N.Y., as a museum.

“I’d known about Tesla for years,” he said of the Serbian-American inventor who helped design the current AC electrical system and who worked from a Colorado Springs lab beginning in 1899. “But I had no idea about the Wardenclyffe idea, and the possibilities to help out there seemed pretty vast.”

Tally’s money helped save Wardenclyffe. But the donation also got him a lot of publicity for his new venture — a dinosaur-themed motel in Denver — because “The Oatmeal” promised to write a cartoon about donors who gave more than $33,000.

Tally’s family bought the Best Western Denver Southwest hotel in 2004, “and emerging out of the Great Recession, we wanted to do something special to stay competitive.”

He was fossil-hunting one day on Dinosaur Ridge in Morrison when the idea struck. “I thought, ‘Why not celebrate this?’ “

Last week they broke ground on the dinosaur haven, which should be finished by April.

The 112-room hotel will resemble a Gilded Age explorers club, with specimen boxes, original “field notes” sketches and reproduction lithographs of dinosaurs lining the halls.

Two restaurants, Paleo Joe’s and the Roof Lizard Lounge, will include fossil casts and display cases. A 30-foot Tylosaur will hang from the ceiling of Paleo Joe’s. The swimming pool will be lined with an Italian-style mosaic of the Late Cretaceous Niobrara Sea, with colorful images of ammonites, belemnites and plesiosaurs swimming along the bottom.

The idea for the prehistoric ocean is rooted in Tally’s fascination with natural history museums, from North America to Europe.

“It’s just the coolness of being in these places, and seeing the modern temples of worship for learning and the romance discovery,” he said.

A favorite is the Sternberg Museum of Natural History in Hays, Kan., which focuses on fossils and marine life of the large inland Western Interior Sea that 85 million years ago split the North American continent into two.

“There were big, toothsome sea monsters swimming along the bottom,” he said. “Ten minutes from my hotel you can see the edge of that ocean, back when Colorado was beachfront property.”

Colleen O’Connor: 303-954-1083, coconnor@denverpost.com or twitter.com/coconnordp