Discovery
The fossilized cycad beds were discovered in 1892 by F. H. Cole of Hot Springs, South Dakota, in the 120-million-year-old Dakota Sandstone Formation, near Minnekahta. Cole sent photographs of the fossils to Professor Henry Newton, a geologist at the Smithsonian Institution. Professor Thomas MacBride of the University of Iowa published the first description of the site in 1893. There were believed to be large deposits of Cretaceous cycad fossils. (Cycads are plants resembling ferns, although not related to them. The ones at this site were tree-sized.)
In 1920, Yale paleobotanist George Reber Wieland obtained the fossil cycad-rich land under the Homestead Act "in order that the cycads might not fall into unworthy hands". Two years later he offered to return the land to the federal government if a national monument could be established to protect the fossils.
Read more about this topic: Fossil Cycad National Monument
Famous quotes containing the word discovery:
“However backwards the world has been in former ages in the discovery of such points as GOD never meant us to know,—we have been more successful in our own days:Mthousands can trace out now the impressions of this divine intercourse in themselves, from the first moment they received it, and with such distinct intelligence of its progress and workings, as to require no evidence of its truth.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“That the discovery of this great truth, which lies so near and obvious to the mind, should be attained to by the reason of so very few, is a sad instance of the stupidity and inattention of men, who, though they are surrounded with such clear manifestations of the Deity, are yet so little affected by them, that they seem as it were blinded with excess of light.”
—George Berkeley (1685–1753)
“He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behavior as well as by application. It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)