Paleontology of the Santa Fe Trail

As the note says with my bio, I am a "researcher and writer who has been helping to inventory and catalog the fossil resources of the National Park Service." A lot of the work I've done has been geared around Inventory & Monitoring networks. The I&M program groups parks with significant natural resources into networks based on their geography and the types of natural resources they contain, with geology and paleontology being among these natural resources. We are gearing up to prepare a revised and updated summary for the Southern Plains Network (SOPN), which includes 11 units in Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas. Although the I&M networks have served as the broad framework for a lot of our work, only 270 of the various units of the NPS are included. Granted, most of those that aren't included are usually small urban sites with little paleontological potential (except for fossiliferous building stone, which is more abundant than you might think; you can scarcely go past a large building in Washington, D.C., without finding Salem Limestone, aka Indiana Limestone, or in other words uncounted itty-bitty fragments of Paleozoic marine invertebrates), but it would be foolish to a priori dismiss them. Thus, when I work on a network, I also like to cover the non-network units that are geographically within that network. In the case of the Southern Plains Network, one of those is the Santa Fe National Historic Trail.