Travel: The Wyoming fossil hunters | Travel

KEMMERER, WYOMING — While he helped his father herd sheep as a child on their Wyoming ranch, Rick Hebdon noticed something strange peeking from the weathered edge of a stream bed. He leaned down and picked up a flat rock about the size of a paperback book. On it — intricate and detailed as if it had been etched by an artist — were the preserved remains of a fossilized fish.

Turning to his father, he held up the stone. “Dad, look at this.”

His father grinned widely and handed his son a shovel.

Now, more than 40 years later, Hebdon has built a career of fossil-hunting. He has uncovered thousands of fossils, including one-of-a-kind finds that range from preserved giant ancient lizards to some of the earth’s earliest mammals.

In August I traveled to southwest Wyoming, near Kemmerer, on my own quest for fossilized fish. My curiosity had been piqued months earlier when I’d met Bryce Hixson, a friendly paleontologist/educator/fossil wholesaler, while traveling in Utah.

Hixson had told me — in hushed tones and with a few sideways glances, as if he were reluctant to let the secret out — of a few ancient lake beds in Wyoming where 50-plus-million-year-old fossils were plentiful, so long as one knew where, when and how to find them.

“You need a good guide, and the window is short,” he had said. “Summer is best because the high-elevation sites are otherwise covered with snow and ice, but it’s truly one of the most amazing places on this entire planet for fossils, and very few people even know it exists.”

Approximately 50 million years ago large lakes covered much of what we now know as Utah, Colorado and Wyoming. Known as the Green River Lakes, these large bodies of fresh water existed in a world vastly different from the dry high-plain deserts that we find there today.

Back then, these areas were subtropical with lush ecosystems, much like the swamps of Florida. Those ancient lakes maintained thriving populations of microscopic cyanobacteria, fishes, stingrays, turtles, birds, bats, insects, crustaceans, amphibians, snakes, alligators, otter-like animals called pantolestids and many more, as well as hundreds of different types of plants.

Each of the three extinct lakes now contains fossil remains of its earlier inhabitants, but the smallest lake — the one now called Fossil Lake near Kemmerer — is often referred to as “history’s aquarium” for the quantity and quality of the specimens found there.

Fossil Lake is estimated to have covered about 930 square miles — about 10 times the size of Lake Tahoe or a little bigger than the entirety of Napa County. Exactly why the lake maintained perfect conditions for making fossils is poorly understood. But whatever the reason, since its discovery in the mid-1800s, Fossil Lake has provided thousands of museum-quality specimens, mostly dug up and preserved by entrepreneur citizen scientists such as Hebdon.

Although the fossilized bones of extinct organisms have been pondered by humans for millennia, it wasn’t until the early 1800s that the modern concept of paleontology began. As a scientific discipline, paleontology exists somewhere between geology and biology. Before then, the collecting and study of fossilized bone had been relegated to the fantastical (e.g., ancient Europeans and South American natives searching for mythological beasts such as giant humans, unicorns or dragons or biblical scholars hoping to find evidence of Noah’s great flood).

However, in the early 1800s two new ideas began shaking up the scientific world. The first was that the age of the earth was much older than previously thought, and the second was that organisms were not fixed and immutable but instead changed slowly over time with new species coming into existence while other species disappeared.

It wasn’t until 1859 that Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace would jointly come up with the concept of descent with modification (i.e., evolution), with some of their most compelling evidence coming from fossils.

One of the earliest professional fossil-hunters was an English woman, Mary Anning, who grew up in Lyme Regis, a small village along the English Channel in southwest England. As a child she had assisted her father — Richard, a cabinetmaker — in his forays to supplement the family’s meager income by collecting and selling odd-shaped “stones” they called “curios” to passing tourists.

The work was cold, dangerous and difficult. The coastal cliffs near Lyme Regis make up a geological formation consisting of alternating layers of crumbly limestone and shale that formed on a shallow seabed during the Jurassic Period about 200 million years ago. These rock layers were nearly perfect for preserving bones and shells.

After her father died unexpectedly when Anning was only 11, the young girl continued her search for fossils. A year later she found an ichthyosaur, which she sold to a London collector for 23 pounds. She later found the world’s first plesiosaurus and hundreds of other important specimens, including a few that Darwin and Wallace would use as evidence for evolution.

As such evidence accumulated, a movement within the religious ranks tried to argue that fossilized bones were not those of long-extinct organisms but instead were the remains of exceptionally rare or shy animals that had not yet been discovered. Thomas Jefferson held such a view, convinced that the Lewis and Clark expedition would find vast herds of giant mammoths and other beasts considered extinct within the unexplored American interior.

By the mid-1800s, there was a growing desire for public displays of fossilized animal remains.

Although the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle had been established in Paris in 1635, the oldest natural history museum in America — the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia (ANSP), Pennsylvania, founded in 1812 — was one of the first to showcase the fossilized remains of large animals. The word “dinosaur” (terrible lizard in Latin) was first coined in 1842 by Richard Owen, one of Britain’s first paleontologists. The Natural History Museum in London didn’t open its doors to the public until 1881, but for decades it had been quietly growing its collection of fossils, many of which had been found by Anning.

The result of the new interest in fossils sparked a mad rush for collectors who were often paid handsomely for the rarest, biggest or most fearsome-looking specimens.

As the United States expanded westward in the mid-1800s, scientists such as Joseph Leidy from the ANSP visited southern Wyoming and began collecting fossils. But the conditions were exceptionally harsh. Frigid winters, dry-hot summers and being miles away from any nearby settlements proved too difficult. It wasn’t until the Union Pacific Railroad laid track in the area during the late 1860s that the true abundance and accessibility of the area’s fossil beds became apparent.

In what became known as the “Bone Wars,” in the 1870s two paleontologists, Edward Cope and Othniel Marsh, each sought to describe more fossils from the Green River area than the other. The resulting ruthlessness and bad behavior read like a novel, with each destroying the other’s fossils and disparaging one another in scientific articles. The end result was economic ruin and professional demise for them both.

As the Annings had done nearly a century earlier and half a world away, in 1897 an amateur collector name Robert Lee Craig began quarrying fossils and selling them to travelers who arrived either by rail or on the Oregon Trail. At the time, the little town where Craig lived was known as Fossil.

The town of Fossil is no more, having dwindled after the regional highway was built nearer to Kemmerer in the 1930s. Today the only hints of the old town are a few small homes and Ulrich’s Fossil Gallery, owned and operated by one of the finest fossil preservationists in the area, Mike Snively.

Just down the road stands the deceptively diminutive Fossil Butte Monument Visitor Center, a must-see for anyone visiting the area. It houses some of the finest and rarest fossils in the world, has high-tech interactive exhibits and is also free (donations accepted). Guided tours can be scheduled, and the staff is friendly and helpful.

Within the town of Kemmerer itself are a few fossil shops with items for sale. For those hoping to visit a quarry and split their own rocks in hopes of finding fossils, a few options exist. I visited the popular American Fossil quarry run by Patrick Hogle and his business partners, and the Fossil Safari at Warfield Fossil Quarries, owned by Rick Hebdon.

Quarry fees range from $50 for a few hours to a few hundred for private sessions. Customers are provided a hammer and chisel to split as many rocks as they like, and they often reveal nearly perfect fossils of fish and other organisms in the process. Most quarries allow any found specimens to be taken home, although the rarest specimens are often retained by the quarry and/or donated/sold to museums, educational institutions or private collectors.

After a long day of my own hot, dusty work splitting rocks, I was exhausted and my back was sore. For my efforts I’d uncovered a few pristine examples of the most common species found in Fossil Lake — Knightia eocaena — a small schooling fish related to herrings and sardines.

“You know that you’re the first human to ever see that fish,” Hebdon said. “That fish hasn’t seen the light of day for over 50 million years.”

The realization made me want to kneel, to genuflect. I held the ancient remains of a species that had gone extinct, a fish that had not swum since a time long before the human species had come into being. I stood as a witness, not only to the extinct life form in my hand, but also to the unbelievably mind-bogglingly rare environmental conditions that made it possible. I wanted to say something, to explain.

“It’s like digging through a box of Cracker Jacks for the prize,” he said. “You never know what you’re going to find, but you always get something cool out of it.”

I nodded and looked back at the fossil. Within the spaces between the tiny fossilized bones I now noticed individual scales, maybe even minute teeth protruding from the jaw.

When I looked back up Hebdon was gazing around his quarry. All the other customers had long departed, but a few professional share-diggers were wrapping up for the day, organizing their finds and stowing their tools. They would keep half the day’s take.

The sunset streaked the cliff walls with pink-gold, and a light breeze brought with it the sweet, musky aroma of the sagebrush that grows thick on the surrounding buttes.

“We’ve found a lot of interesting fossils at this quarry over the years,” he said. “Some are completely new species that have helped advance our scientific understanding.”

He looked at the rock in my hand and smiled.

“But they are also just so beautiful to look at,” he said. “To just hold in your hand for a while and be amazed.”