Fossils Telling Stories Across The National Park System

By Kurt Repanshek

Thirty-two-million years after a saber-tooth cat stalked prey on the landscape known today as Badlands National Park, a 7-year-old girl working for her latest Junior Ranger badge spotted the animal's fossilized skull protruding from a hillside. It was a discovery that helped foster an interest in science for the youngster, and one that underscored the rich faunal history harbored in the landscape of the National Park System. 

Evidence of big prehistoric cats, whale-sized sharks, wooly mammoths, and even sea cows along with many other fossilized faunal and floral species have been found in nearly 300 units of the park system, some in the most unexpected locations.

"We think that the National Park Service preserves a really good example of America's paleontological heritage spanning from some of the earliest known life forms, these algal mats that are preserved high in the Rocky Mountains at Glacier National Park," said Vince Santucci, the Park Service's senior paleontologist, said during this week's podcast from the National Parks Traveler. "They're well over a billion years old. And [the fossil record] spans all the way through Pleistocene [and] Holocene cave fossils in Grand Canyon, Guadalupe Mountains, and elsewhere, that preserved these Ice Age animals, some that lived and died and are preserved within these caves."

Some of the fossils, such as the saber-tooth skull Kylie Ferguson spotted in 2010 during her Junior Ranger outing at Badlands National Park in South Dakota, come to the surface as the result of ever-present erosion, while others, such as the roughly 325-million-year-old shark fossils found underground at Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky, result from the curiosity of observant rangers. Some of the fossils are the remains, as Santucci noted, of nondescript-to-the-layperson agal mats laid down more than a billion years ago, delicate, fossilized bats, and even towering wooly mammoths.

If you’ve ever visited Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona you’ve no doubt marveled over the colorful fossilized tree trunks scattered across the park's landscape. There are also fossilized trees on the northern range of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, but they're nowhere near as colorful. Fossilized dinosaur tracks have surfaced in many parks, including, believe it or not, Gettysburg National Military Park, according to Santucci, and there are at least six units of the National Park System that include "fossil" in their official names: Fossil Butte National Monument in Wyoming, Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument in Nevada, John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in Oregon, Agate Fossil Beds National Monument in Nebraska, Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in Colorado, and Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument in Idaho.

While the Park Service since 1985 has identified 286 park units that contain fossils, the search goes on to expand the agency's knowledge of the park system's fossil assemblages.

"We do a lot of baseline inventories, to try to identify the different types of fossils that occur in the parks," Santucci explained. "Park rangers want to know everything there is to know about their park so when we tell them there's fossils there, they become our great advocates and want to share that information responsibly with the public along with the resource stewardship message about how they shouldn't be taking these fossils home as souvenirs when they leave the park."

Strained Paleontological Resources

Surprisingly, across a park system that counts 429 units, the Park Service employs just a dozen paleontologists, said Santucci.

"We need a lot of help. And we're fortunate to have good partners in the scientific community that provide us a lot of support," he said. "A lot of young students in paleontology that are looking to gain experience. But we have currently 12 paleontologists working to support our efforts across the agency. Most of those are based in a park. So Petrified Forest National Park, Badlands National Park, and John Day Fossil Beds in Oregon have paleontology staff. A lot of their work is focusing on the fossils within the boundaries of that park. Occasionally, we can get some help where they can come out and provide support in one of the adjacent parks that needs some assistance."

A Megalodon shark's tooth millions of years old was found at Cape Lookout National Seashore/NPS

In Utah, the Park Service receives help from the Utah Geological Survey, which has conducted fossil inventories in national park sites in the state since 2002, when it conducted one in Zion National Park.

"Utah has one of the best fossil records of any place on Earth and our national parks contain amazing fossil resources," the survey notes on its website. "Fossils found in Utah’s national parks range in age from the Paleozoic Era through the Holocene Epoch (541 million years ago [Ma] to recent). Many of the parks showcase the spectacular Mesozoic-age (252 to 66 Ma) red-rock scenery of the Colorado Plateau, and most vertebrate fossils are found in these rocks. Rocks of Triassic (252 to 201 Ma) and Jurassic (201 to 145 Ma) age are particularly well represented."

Long before the National Park Service was established in 1916, geologists and paleontologists were scouring the West for fossils. Ferdinand Hayden, who gained fame for his explorations of Yellowstone in the 1870s, previously had come west to study geology and collect fossils. The bigger names included Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, two paleontologists who became involved in a very personal and bitter race to collect fossils.

No doubt, many of the fossils these scientists uncovered came from landscapes that later were added to the National Park System, such as Badlands, Dinosaur National Monument, and Agate Fossil Beds National Monument. Today the bones reside in musuems, often far from where they were collected.

"We feel that our jobs are some of the most exciting jobs anywhere because there's a lot of discovery. And it's not just the scientific discoveries we're making of these fossils in parks, but the history, the rich history associated with the discoveries and collections," said Santucci. "Many of the collections of fossils that we found in museums were collected prior to that area becoming a national park. And so being able to connect the dots in that way, these rich stories of fossil discoveries made in the American West, really have enhanced these wonderful stories that have both a historic context, a human dimension to them, as well as the scientific information that's associated with these ancient life forms."

Discoveries are not relegated to the West, either, the paleontologist said.

"We're finding them all over, including in Alaska. There's been some really tremendous discoveries over the past 20 years in Alaska national parks where in these very remote areas scientists are getting out and they're doing baseline inventories," he said. "They're documenting some of the largest fossil dinosaur tracks in North America at these very high latitudes that no one really predicted that they would find dinosaur remains that far north."

Other unusual finds in unusual locations include:

• Fossilized remains of a sea cow as well as a dwarf, or pygmy, mammoth at Channel Islands National Park off the coast of California.
• Dinosaur tracks found at Gettysburg National Military Park by Civilian Conservation Corps crews while they were building bridges using native rock.
• Miocene-age long-nose dolphins discovered at George Washington Birthplace National Monument in Virginia.
• A fist-sized fossilized megalodon tooth spotted on a beach in Cape Lookout National Seashore in North Carolina.

A once-upon-unit of the National Park System that contained fossils is no more: Fossil Cycad National Monument in South Dakota.

"It's an unfortunate story about a National Park Service unit that was established in 1922," Santucci explained. "Under the authority of the Antiquities Act, President Harding preserved this area that had this very rich fossil plant deposit. Cycads are plants, they sort of look like a pineapple. And so this area in the southern Black Hills that preserved these cycad deposits were being studied by the Smithsonian and some other specialists who studied fossil plants. They were just so excited about the fact that Dinosaur National Monument was preserved just a few years earlier, that they felt that they wanted to get a fossil plant locality preserved and they felt that this was a really good one.

"Unfortunately," he continued, "during the '20s and then into the '30s, during the Depression, the Park Service didn't invest a lot of time or money in developing Fossil Cycad. And so if you build it, they will come, and based on a number of unfortunate circumstances it was determined by the mid-1930s that all of the fossils that had occurred and were exposed at the surface were removed. And they were not removed under permit, they were taken from the site."

It took a while, but finally, in 1957, Fossil Cycad National Monument was decommissioned because of the theft of the fossils.

Fossils Redefining Human Existence

The most astounding fossil find on national park lands in recent memory was at White Sands National Park in New Mexico, where an observant ranger spotted what turned out to be fossilized human footprints (top photo) that pushed back by roughly 10,000 years the time period when humans were first thought to have reached North America. David Bustos, the park's chief of resources, spotted what he thought were footprints on preserve playa lake sediments.

"I had never spoken to David but I received an email from him," recalled Santucci. "And he said, 'Hey, can I send you some photos?' When I saw those photos, it certainly changed my life."

Santucci, who headed to White Sands as soon as he could, said the playa contained mammoth, camel, and cat tracks likely from the Pleistocene Epoch.

"We brought in an international team of experts to be able to evaluate these resources. We were able to fly drones to get aerial videography and photographs in some of the most restricted airspace outside of the White Sands Missile Range to be able to document, and we confirmed through that process that there are not just lots of track sites, there are tens of thousands," the paleontologist said. "And we so we refer to the area as a mega track site. Very rich, probably one of the richest Ice Age fossil tracks site known anywhere in North America, maybe the world."

Discovery of fossilized human footprints in today's White Sands National Park created new visions of life on that landscape 23,000 years ago/Courtesy Karen Carr

But the track sites were made not only by animals, but by humans, said Santucci, and closer examination of the prints indicated what appears to be familial groups, and possibly a mother carrying a child who from time to time was set down on the ground to walk on its own.

"In April of 2018, after we had our first press conference on our first publication that we published about the fossil tracks at the White Sands, we went back out into the field and they showed us this very long track way," he said. "And then we all got on our hands and knees and continued to try to document, excavate, clean out some of these tracks. That day, another day I'll never forget, I was down there cleaning the tracks and I came upon a track that was just a couple of inches. And the more that I cleaned it, the more that it reminded me of my granddaughter, who was three years old, Lilly, her foot. And I was holding my breath. And I'm thinking, I can't be looking at an Ice Age, human footprint. And so I waited until I really got it cleaned out before I embarrassed myself and invited others to look at it. And when they came over, they all simultaneously said, 'There's a baby!'"

While the Park Service continues to study how best to show off those trackways at White Sands, there are plenty of other units of the Park System you can visit on October 16, National Fossil Day, or most any other day of the year to explore the fossilized side of the parks. To see which parks you might consider, visit this Park Service webpage that lists the 286 units with confirmed fossil discoveries. And be observant. You might be able to add your name alongside Kylie Ferguson's by making a discovery

Traveler footnote: Catch our entire interview with Vince Santucci in National Parks Traveler Episode 272 | Fossilized Parks.