Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument near Hagerman, Idaho, contains the largest concentration of Hagerman Horse fossils in North America. The fossil horses for which the Monument is famous have been found in only one locale in the northern portion of the Monument called the Hagerman Horse Quarry. The 4,351-acre (17.6 km2) Monument is internationally significant because it protects the world's richest known fossil deposits from a time period called the late Pliocene epoch, 3.5 million years ago. These plants and animals represent the last glimpse of that time that existed before the Ice Age, and the earliest appearances of modern flora and fauna. This is also significant because the fossils present during this period of the Pliocene represent species which were alive during the early stages in the evolution of man, albeit on a different continent.
Read more about Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument: Notable Fossils
Famous quotes containing the words fossil, beds, 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 (18171862)
“For the baby suckles and there is a people made of milk for her to use. There are milk trees to hiss her on. There are milk beds in which to lie and dream of a warm room. There are milk fingers to fold and unfold. There are milk bottoms that are wet and caressed and put into their cotton.”
—Anne Sexton (19281974)
“The national anthem belongs to the eighteenth century. In it you find us ordering God about to do our political dirty work.”
—George Bernard Shaw (18561950)
“It is remarkable that the dead lie everywhere under stones.... Why should the monument be so much more enduring than the fame which it is designed to perpetuate,a stone to a bone? Here lies,MHere lies;Mwhy do they not sometimes write, There rises? Is it a monument to the body only that is intended?”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)