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.
The John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act continues to give to the National Park System. This week the National Park Service closed on a 280-acre parcel of land for Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in Colorado.
According to the NPS website for this national monument, "Beneath a grassy mountain valley in central Colorado lies one of the richest and most diverse fossil deposits in the world. Petrified redwood stumps up to 14 feet wide and thousands of detailed fossils of insects and plants reveal the story of a very different, prehistoric Colorado."
A window into the last Ice Age in the present-day desert outside of Las Vegas brings a missing link into the National Park System along with a small, but enticing, possibility that fossilized human remains are buried next to those of ancient bison, camels, and even lions.
If you're in central Colorado this coming weekend, consider visiting Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument on Saturday to catch a glimpse of meteors slicing across the night skies.
Many national parks preserve aspects of the past, and in the case of Fossil Butte National Monument, that past goes back 55 million years ago, a time when the landscape of western Wyoming was very different from the windswept plains we see today.
Earlier this month you no doubt heard that America's 15-year-olds' science scores, when compared to those of their peers in other countries, were just average. How might they be improved? Well, if your daughter or son enjoy visiting national parks, nudge them in the direction of a career as a scientist working in the parks.