I haven't posted as much on my National Park Service projects over the past
couple of years, in part because I don't want to accidentally reveal sensitive
locality information and in part because much of what I've done in that time
frame doesn't lend itself to a blog format. As anyone who's worked somewhere
long enough can tell you, eventually your duties start creeping toward
management. It's very important to do things like coordinate reviews, provide
feedback, maintain archives and data, and otherwise keep things going as
smoothly as possible, but they make for dry posts. To make up for it and show
off some the work we've been doing, I'm going to briefly highlight our most
recent park inventories, which all have public versions available.
Over the past year, we've published five park-level inventories, as both
sensitive versions (internal-NPS only, with detailed locality information) and
public versions. Lead authorship for these five includes park staff, a
Scientists in Parks participant, a team of subject-matter experts, and in one
case myself. I'm unofficial editor-in-chief for the Paleontology Program and
have been intimately involved in getting these to publication, including
taking care of aspects such as formatting, styles, copy-editing, and overall
consistency among reports. Park-level inventories are intended for a park
audience first, so we try to avoid jargon or make sure it is defined. In days
past these were published as physical copies, but they are essentially digital
now, which helps with the inclusion of more figures. I'm a big advocate of
lots of photos, to help park staff identify types of fossils (and things that
aren't fossils!).
The group of five from 2024–2025 runs a broad gamut of geography, geologic
time, and types of fossils. Digital copies can be found at the NPS's
DataStore
on IRMA (Integrated Resource Management Applications) and the outside website
National Park Service History Electronic Library & Archive. (Both sites are also fun to search in general if you have any interest in
parks!) Full citations are provided in the references at the end, with the
IRMA link as the DOI and the NPS History link under the title (direct pdf
link).
Bryce Canyon National Park
Bryce Canyon National Park
in southern Utah is famous for its scenery, which is weathered out of the
colorful strata of the Paleogene Claron Formation. The Claron, though, is
rather limited for fossils unless you like terrestrial snails or insect
burrows. Instead, Bryce Canyon's best fossils come from the Upper Cretaceous
Straight Cliffs–Wahweap sequence, which is notable because these strata slot
into part of what is otherwise a rough 20–25 million years for terrestrial
fossils in North America (about 100 to 75 Ma). Those of you familiar with the
Cretaceous of North America know what happened in that time frame: the choice
terrestrial depositional basins decided to take up snorkeling for an extended
period. It has only been in the past few decades that a solid fossil record
has been found for some of this gap. The Straight Cliffs Formation is good for
vertebrate microfossils, and there are several such localities in Bryce
Canyon. In fact, the paleontological inventory was begun in a roundabout way
due to microfossils, following emergency monitoring and salvage efforts at
microfossil sites on an area of road work. The resurgence of interest in
fossils at the park led to an impressive field-based survey by a team of park
staff and Scientist in Parks participants in 2022 and 2023 that was documented
in Tran et al. (2024).
Colorado National Monument
Colorado National Monument
in western Colorado is right outside of classic Morrison Formation collecting
areas (the type locality of Brachisaurus altithorax among them). There
is a history going back to the 1970s of paleontological inventories
documenting aspects of the monument's fossils, such as the Morrison Formation
or sites in the vicinity of trails. In 2023, Scientist in Parks participant
Austin Shaffer spent a nine-month term investigating the sites found in the
previous inventories and looking for new sites (Shaffer et al. 2024a). The
monument was already known as a place with notable terrestrial trace fossils,
but Austin turned up an outstanding variety of tracks, principally in the
Morrison Formation and the Naturita Formation (formerly known as the Dakota
Formation in this area). The new Morrison Formation tracks are notable because
they appear to include both stegosaur and ankylosaur tracks, while the
Naturita Formation wasn't even known to be fossiliferous in the monument
before. In between, the Burro Canyon Formation (roughly equivalent to the
Cedar Mountain Formation of Utah) has some uncommon bone material attributed
to a sauropod, the catch being it's in a blastedly hard conglomeratic
sandstone.
Cuyahoga Valley National Park
Turning eastward,
Cuyahoga Valley National Park
in northeastern Ohio is a little like Mississippi National River and
Recreation Area in the Twin Cities, as a river-centered park unit with
Paleozoic bedrock situated in an urban area. Here we're mostly looking at the
Devonian and Mississippian. Sporadic reports of fossils have been made here
since the 19th century, and one of our partners (J.-P. Hodnett) made a
paleontological reconnaissance in 2022, but a systematic investigation of the
area had never been done. We were impressed with Austin's work on the Colorado
National Monument inventory and wanted to get him on another project, and the
Cuyahoga project came together in the summer of 2024 (Shaffer et al. 2024b).
This time there were no dinosaurs (which would have been rather surprising!),
but in addition to the expected Devonian–Mississippian marine invertebrates
there was scrappy plant material, a likely eurypterid, and a fragment of a
possible Mississippian tetrapodomorph jaw. There is also a partial skeleton of
a heretofore-undescribed Devonian ctenacanth shark that was found back in the
1930s.
Effigy Mounds National Monument
Effigy Mounds National Monument
in northeastern Iowa was a park unit that had long been on my radar because of
its bedrock geology: Jordan Sandstone up to the Dunleith Formation. I got the
opportunity in 2023 to spend some time on the ground there and was rewarded
with the discovery of a healthy assortment of Platteville Formation fossils
(left in place!). More than two dozen taxa could be distinguished, mostly
brachiopods and snails (Tweet and Santucci 2025). I also turned up an
unexpected earliest reference to fossils in what is now the monument: as part
of
David Dale Owen's survey of the region, Benjamin Shumard stopped by in 1848 and recorded
gastropods in what we would now call the Prairie du Chien Group (named for
Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, right across the river).
Mammoth Cave National Park
Mammoth Cave National Park's report is the most recent to be published, but preliminary work toward it
began in 2019, making this our project with the longest gestation to date. Why
so long? Well, for one thing it's essentially an edited volume with eight
fully developed separate topical inventories: history of work, geology,
Paleozoic plants, Paleozoic invertebrates and ichnofossils except for
echinoderms, Paleozoic echinoderms, Paleozoic vertebrates, Quaternary
vertebrates, and paleontological resource management and similar topics. Each
had its own authorship group of subject-matter experts (except for the one on
invertebrates and ichnofossils, which was done by some guy who mostly knows
the Ordovician of Minnesota), and each had its own review process.
Furthermore, the teams working to locate fossils are very, very good at doing
so, so we kept on (keep on!) getting new information. Finally, at the
beginning of 2024 the publication office made substantial changes to how they
wanted submissions to be set up, then revised the new version, and as you
might imagine it can be an interesting challenge to make changes to a document
that is on the order of 450 pages long with nearly 200 figures. So, it took a
long time, but I think the results are absolutely worth it.
References
Shaffer, A. B., J. S. Tweet, and V. L. Santucci. 2024a.
Colorado National Monument: Paleontological resource inventory (public
version). Science Report NPS/SR—2024/116. National Park Service, Fort Collins,
Colorado.
https://doi.org/10.36967/2303613
Shaffer, A. B. , V. L. Santucci , J. S. Tweet , and J.-P. M. Hodnett. 2024b.
Cuyahoga Valley National Park: Paleontological resource inventory (public
version). Science Report NPS/SR—2024/210. National Park Service, Fort Collins,
Colorado.
https://doi.org/10.36967/2306411
Tran, T., A. E. Bonham, J. S. Tweet, and V. L. Santucci. 2024.
Bryce Canyon National Park: Paleontological resource inventory (public
version). Science Report NPS/SR—2024/123. National Park Service, Fort Collins,
Colorado.
https://doi.org/10.36967/2303710
Toomey, R. S., J. S. Tweet, and V. L. Santucci , editors. 2025.
Mammoth Cave National Park: Paleontological resource inventory (public
version). Science Report NPS/SR—2025/243. National Park Service, Fort Collins,
Colorado.
https://doi.org/10.36967/2308547
Tweet, J. S., and V. L. Santucci. 2025. Effigy Mounds National Monument:
Paleontological resource inventory (public version). Science Report. NPS/SR—2025/230. National Park Service. Fort Collins,
Colorado.
https://doi.org/10.36967/2307451