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Thirty-two million years ago, a five-foot-tall, hornless rhinoceros died at a waterhole in what is now South Dakota. The herbivore was not alone. A collie-size horse and a foot-tall, deer-like mammal also perished at the oasis along with a tortoise.
No one knew about these animals and the lives they had lived until July 2003, when Park Service personnel Greg McDonald and Rod Horrocks discovered the fossilized remains at Wind Cave National Park. "This is a really extraordinary find," says McDonald, paleontology program coordinator for the National Park Service. "Oligocene fossils from the Black Hills are rare, and most previous discoveries have been single bones and isolated teeth. To find not only a complete skull and jaws but part of the skeleton was totally unexpected."
This extraordinary find continues a long tradition of fossil discovery on National Park Service lands. These include 70-million-year-old hadrosaur prints, the first dinosaur tracks from Alaska, located after two years of searching Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve on the Aleutian Islands; the most complete skeleton of the only pygmy island-dwelling mammoth at Channel Islands National Park in California; the first fossils ever described from the western hemisphere, mollusks collected in 1687 at what is now Colonial National Historical Park in Virginia; and the graveyards of 20-million-year-old camels and rhinos at Agate Fossil Beds National Monument in Nebraska. This last site was described by early 20th-century paleontologist W.D. Mathews as "one of the greatest fossil quarries ever found in America."
"Everything you can ever think of preserved in the fossil record, from microscopic pollen to 35-ton Apatosaurus, I can probably find an example of it in at least one park, if not more than one," says McDonald.
The fossils span geologic time, from Precambrian to the Holocene, and have helped flesh out the lives of hundreds of different animals and plants. They also tell the story of how mammals evolved and what the landscape once looked like millions of years ago.
Although today it is hard to imagine that dinosaurs once lived in a tropical rainforest in what is now the Painted Desert of southern Arizona, the beautiful mahogany, ochre, and orange agatized fossils found there provide the proof. And although it is no surprise that abundant fossils have been found at places with names such as Agate Fossil Beds, Hagerman Fossil Beds, John Day Fossil Beds, and Dinosaur national monuments, they also have been unearthed at Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania, revealing that dinosaurs walked across the area more than 200 million years ago.
Despite the incredible historic and geologic value of these fantastic discoveries, all is not well in the fossil world. When McDonald and Horrocks found their fossils, they told the park superintendent but no one else, not even their wives. "If word had gotten out, the fossils would have disappeared," says Horrocks, physical science specialist at Wind Cave.
Their desire for secrecy is well founded. In 1999, National Park Service staff reported 721 incidents of fossil theft or vandalism, and one study estimated that visitors annually take up to 12 tons of petrified wood from Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona, a fact that in 2000 and 2001 led NPCA to place the park on its list of America's Ten Most Endangered National Parks. The park has come off the list in the last few years partly because Congress has moved forward with legislation, supported by NPCA, to expand the park to include the 22-mile-long Chinle escarpment, only six miles of which are currently within the park. The legislation, sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.), would more than double the park's acreage and protect world-class paleontological resources, unique archaeological sites, and the park's scenic vistas.
Although the amount of petrified wood disappearing from Petrified Forest is tremendous, the most notorious case of fossil theft occurred at Fossil Cycad National Monument in South Dakota.
Congress established the monument in 1922 to protect what Yale paleobotanist George Wieland called "the world's finest actually petrified forest." First discovered in 1892, the 320-acre site contained one of the best collections of these primitive plants. By the 1930s, however, professional and amateur collectors had removed most of the fossils. In fact, so many were removed that Congress abolished the monument in 1957 because no cycads remained visible at the surface.
"Two lessons can be learned from Cycad, neither of which we have applied fully," says Vince Santucci, now chief ranger at George Washington Memorial Parkway in Virginia but formerly the only self-described "pistol-packing park paleontologist."
"First, the Park Service has a bias toward biology; geologic resources don't get the attention they deserve. The second is that we have to be aggressive about preventing souvenir collecting."
Only 14 park units mention fossils in their enabling legislation, although researchers have found fossils in more than 170 of the 388 park units. Until recently, the Park Service had only two professional paleontologists on staff. Although there are signs that the Park Service has begun to pay more attention to its extraordinary collection of paleontological resources, Santucci notes that greater enforcement and stronger laws would help to deter commercial thieves who steal fossils for a profit and that better education programs would help to dissuade visitors from removing what can be historically invaluable items from national parks.
Visitors may believe they are doing no harm, but once a fossil is removed, its historical context and scientific value are lost. Santucci says visitors take fossils for a number of reasons. Many don't know it is illegal. "When they see the Kemmerer [Wyoming] Chamber of Commerce advertise that it is a good area to collect fossils, visitors to Fossil Butte can be perplexed that you cannot collect anything on our 8,000 acres," says Santucci, who added that commercial collecting is limited to a few state and private quarries in the area.
Others collect fossils because it is a family tradition, and some do it because they think if they don't take it, the fossil will merely erode.
Another reason may be the hope of financial reward. In 1997, the Field Museum of Chicago bought the most complete skeleton ever found of a Tyrannosaurus rex. Known as Sue, for its discoverer Susan Hendrickson, the 50-foot-long specimen sold for $8.4 million. "Sue started people thinking they could find their own million-dollar fossil," says Santucci. "They see fossil collecting as an easy way to make money."
For more than a decade, the Park Service has been trying to focus more directly on this problem. A survey conducted in 1992 showed that the parks were underreporting fossil thefts. "Law enforcement rangers often did not know what to look for, or parks didn't report incidents because of embarrassment," says Santucci.
As a result, the Park Service began a training program to underscore the importance of fossils. The program also provides rangers with guidance on where to go if they need additional help and what laws govern these resources. Santucci says the number of thefts and vandalism has increased in recent years, but he can't say whether this is the result of better reporting or worsening behavior. "But we clearly see that rangers and other federal employees are doing a better job of watching and reporting," says Santucci.
The National Park Service also has begun to invest more staff and focus more research on paleontology. The Park Service now employs 15 professional paleontologists, and McDonald, who works out of the Denver Service Center, is the first full-time paleontologist in a central office.
In addition to an increase in staff, the Park Service has begun its first inventory and monitoring program of fossils. Surveys already have been completed at Yellowstone and Death Valley national parks to establish baselines, provide management recommendations, and develop interpretive guidelines. Other surveys are under way at Arches and Joshua Tree, several Alaska parks, and the Northeast Coastal Barrier Network.
McDonald also cites another positive development. In 2003, the Senate unanimously passed the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act, which NPCA has helped to promote. The bill would codify existing regulations and create specific laws regarding fossil collection. It is stalled in the House.
"The idea is to make it easier for the public to understand the laws," says McDonald. "The law not only says what you can't do, but it also guarantees the rights of amateurs to have access to fossils on public lands," says McDonald.
Collecting vertebrate fossils without a permit would be illegal, but individuals could still collect plants and invertebrate fossils for personal use. Collectors and others would not be permitted to remove fossils from national park lands.
The act also would make laws consistent on all federal lands and would significantly increase penalties for stealing fossils from federal lands. "One of the big problems we have is that with higher values for fossils, the deterrent hasn't gone up," says Ted Vlamis of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontologists.
For example, a commercial dealer purchased for $90,000 an Allosaurus illegally collected from Bureau of Land Management land, sold it for $400,000, and paid only a $50,000 penalty. Under the new regulations, the penalty would be based on the scientific or fair market value, whichever is higher, as well as costs for response, restoration, and repair of the resource and the paleontological site involved.
Protecting paleontological resources is about more than just preserving the scientific context though, says McDonald. "What makes us human, as far as I am concerned, is wanting to know about the world around us. It doesn't matter whether you are a bird watcher, like wildflowers, are a rockhound, or collect fossils-that experience helps you better appreciate the world around you." For McDonald, his life-long curiosity has come full circle. "When I was seven years old, my parents made the mistake of taking me to Dinosaur National Monument. I saw all those big bones on the wall and caught the dinosaur bug. My folks are still waiting for me to outgrow it."
David Williams is a freelance writer based in Seattle, Washington. He last wrote an Excursions piece for National Parks about Seattle.
