Fossil Butte National Monument is a unit of the National Park Service located 15 miles west of Kemmerer, Wyoming, USA. It centers on an extraordinary assemblage of Eocene Epoch (56 to 34 million years ago) animal and plant fossils associated with the smallest lake — Fossil Lake — of the three great lakes which were present at that time in what are now Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado. The other two were lakes were Lake Gosiute and Lake Uinta. Fossil Butte National Monument was established as a national monument on October 23, 1972.
Fossil Butte National Monument preserves the best paleontological record of Tertiary aquatic communities in North America and possibly the world, within the 50-million-year-old Green River Formation — the ancient lake bed. Fossils preserved — including fish, alligators, bats, turtles, dog-sized horses, insects, and many other species of plants and animals — suggest that the region was a low, subtropical, freshwater basin when the sediments accumulated, over about a 2 million-year period.
Read more about Fossil Butte National Monument: History, Exhibits, Activities, List of Fossil Species Recovered At Fossil Butte National Monument, Gallery
Famous quotes containing the words fossil, national and/or monument:
“The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative, to benumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.”
—Ida M. Tarbell (1857–1944)
“Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city’s throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)