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
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