Fossils

Approximately 45-minutes outside of Colorado Springs, on the opposite side of Pikes Peak, is the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument.  There, imbedded in layers of shale are the fossil remnants of over 1700 species of plants and animals that lived 35-million years ago.

Sue and I visited Florissant during a recent trip to Colorado.  We wandered through the remains of a petrified forest and then went to a local fossil quarry, where for a small fee we were provided tools and allowed to rummage through piles of rock in search of hidden fossils. Some of the ones we found, now sit on my desk.

I became interested in fossils, not from my trips to Colorado, but during the years when I lived in Manhattan, Kansas. About ½-mile from my home was a roadcut, exposing layers of limestone. My kids and I would ride our bikes to that part of the road and search through the debris on the ground looking for fossils.  We had to be careful to avoid shards of glass, fragments of broken bottles tossed from passing cars and trucks, a reminder of human thoughtlessness. Usually, we would ride home, our pockets stuffed with prehistoric treasures.

The fossils we found had fallen from a layer of limestone located about 6-feet above the road.  That one layer was composed of mostly clams and brachiopods.  It was formed at a time when waters receded, and calcified shells became permanently imbedded within the drying mud.

Manhattan is located in the northern portion of the Flint Hills. There, the rocks are not shale, but limestone and chert.  The rocks are not 35-million years old, but 250-million years old.  The Eocene epoch, 35-million years ago, was well after the time of the dinosaurs, when mammals were beginning to dominate the land.  The Permian period, 250-million years ago, was long before the dinosaurs, a time when large portions of Kansas were under water.

Cumulatively, the earth’s fossil record tells the story of great cycles of life.  First, there is a blossoming of diverse species, followed by a mass extinction, followed by a new blossoming of life.  Five times there have been mass extinctions.  The best known one heralded the end of the age of dinosaurs.  But the most complete of the great extinctions, the Permian extinction, occurred 150-million years earlier.  The Permian period was characterized by an abundant and diverse sea life.  It ended, for reasons that are unknown, when 90 percent of all existing species ceased to be.

Most naturalists and ecologists agree that we are living during the time of a sixth mass extinction.  The cause of this one is well known, and it is us. But our fossil history tells us that life on earth, as it has before, will continue and after this extinction will come a new flowering of life.  Maybe it will happen, 250-million years hence, there will be a creature, as unimaginable to me as I to the dinosaur, that will uncover my fossilized bones and wonder, “What manner of beast was this?”

Fossils put the world into a perspective measured in millions of years, whereas our lives are but a brief moment.  And yet, now matters to me for my children and my grandchildren. If there is still time to change, I hope they will not be party to a great dying, but part of a great flowering.