Me and You and a Dog Named Boo: Fossil Butte National Monument

I have a National Parks Passport Book that Lynne McDougal gave me when I retired. It is almost completely filled up with stamps from various places we have visited, just four years later. Any time we see a national monument or historical site or national park, we try to make it a point to visit. Some are very little known and a bit out of the way, as was Fossil Butte National Monument, but we could take just a bit of a detour to get there on our way to Bear Lake in Utah. We were not disappointed.

The drive from Flaming Gorge took us north through what my parents would have called "God-forsaken country" through Manila and Urie, crossing I80 to Kemmerer and west on Rte 30. The road was paved but not in the greatest shape. The area was almost totally uninhabited except for small little towns, probably dependent on the oil and gas industry or mining of some kind. Kemmerer's claim to fame is that it had the first J.C. Penney store! Wow! You turn right off Route 30 and go up a bout 1/2 mile to the visitor center. Along the way, there were signposts every so often that separated the various geological ages that began 4 1/2 billion years ago. The distance between signs represents different events in Earth's history.

AND, more recently....

50 million years ago, an ancient lake, Fossil Lake, existed in what is now southwest Wyoming. This ancient lakebed has exceptionally fossiliferous (a new word for me) sediments. The unusual chemistry of the lake prevented decay. The limestone in the area contains the highest concentration of fossil fish in the world. Fossil Lake is the world's best Paleocene record of freshwater lake ecosystems. Preserved with the fish is an ancient aquatic ecosystem: crustaceans, amphibians, alligators, turtles, birds and mammals. Some very rare fossils of a horse, snakes, lizards and bats have also been found here. It is an amazing place-the kind of place where you'd like to take a few courses, if you had more time.

Here are some examples of the outstanding fossils found here.

TURTLES