The Backyard Science group regularly features the Daily Bucket. Blossom end rot threatening your tomatoes? New frog in the neighborhood? Surly yellow jackets showing up? Please add your own observations in a comment. Insects, weather, meteorites, climate, birds, and more are all worthy additions to the Bucket. Include, as close as is comfortable, your location. Your impressions will provide additional viewpoints of the life around us.
The thunderhead clouds exploded up into the summer sky, darkening the horizon. The knock-you-to-your-knees rain started immediately. Within hours, the Papillion Creek transformed from a narrow trickle meandering through West Omaha, Nebraska. Instead, pumped full of storm water, it swept away everything within its now-mile-wide path, carrying away acres of farm land and jumbled islands of washed down trees, flowing as fast as an express bus, towards the Missouri River.
It was 1960. I was 10. I’d played in the Papio, as we called it, for years. It was sometimes shallow enough to wade, but over the centuries had carved a 100-foot-deep canyon through the Nebraska loam. Often, where the creek cut open the subsurface, my buddies and I found old bison bones; reminders of when buffalo (Bison Bison) filled the prairies a century prior.
After the floodwaters receded, my friends and I happily went exploring the damage. The Papio had torn a deep and wide swath through its former channel. As we sorted through the debris, we found a trove of exposed bones. Some looked like the bison bones, but others were heavier and felt different, more like rocks.
We brought every bone we could carry to my house and examined them. Even a kid could tell some of these were very old. My long-suffering mother agreed to drive us and our find the next day to Morril Hall, which is the State Museum at the University, so we could ask scientists what we had found.
Once there, we met with two good-humored paleontologists who swiftly sorted through our collection.
“Look here, son,” one said early on, ”These bones were sawed, there was probably a pioneer cattle butchering operation upstream on the Papio years ago.” My face flushed with shame. I hadn’t noticed the clean cuts through many of the bones.
But within minutes, the other scientist chuckled,”Ho ho, what have we here? It looks like camel bones,” he concluded, hefting one of the barbell-shaped, heavier, mineralized leg bones. And they were. We’d found several reminders that over a million years ago, huge camels (Gigantocamelus) roamed what was then the Nebraska Serengeti, along with rhinos, and other bizarre and unique critters.
The paleontologists gave us back our haul, the t-bones along with the camel tibias. I was hooked. Camel bones! I knew then I wanted to get up tomorrow morning and go find unique dinosaur fossils. I would be famous like Roy Chapman Andrews, who hunted dinosaur fossils in Mongolia, and was the model for the movie character Indiana Jones.
Then I checked out several library books and discovered the bitter truth. For countless eons, Nebraska was part of the great “Western Interior Seaway” and remained under 2500 feet of ocean during the prime dinosaur Cretaceous Era of 144 to 65 million years ago. Cruelly, the sea ebbed right at Nebraska’s eastern border, along the Missouri River’s current course.
The books said plainly, “No dinosaur fossil has ever been found in Nebraska.” Any dinosaur bones in Nebraska would be unfindable, buried under a mile or more of chalk, old sea bottom, loam and gravel. I was thwarted.
That was one of my earliest clues that I was not a good fit for Nebraska. Another clue was the Army Corps bulldozing every twist and turn out of the Papio Creek, and turning it into a 100-yard-wide drainage ditch with gently sloping, treeless, grassy sides.
It made for a wonderful walkway, but I missed the Papio’s wildness, and its forests.
I left Nebraska after high school in 1969 and went to California. Little did I suspect, as I drove out of Nebraska on Interstate 80 faster than the law allowed, that an incredible fossil find waited just to the north.
In 1971, Paleontologist Mike and Geologist Jane Voorhies stumbled onto a gully stripped bare by recent heavy rains in northeast Nebraska. They found a layer of volcanic ash 12 feet deep. Within that layer they uncovered an extremely rare “lagerstatten,” where unusual conditions had preserved a wide variety of fossilized critters.
Several million years ago, an Idaho volcano had spewed such a massive ash cloud that a large herd of rhino, camels, prehistoric horses, saber-toothed deer, (Longirostromeryx) and other critters long since past, had been smothered—and preserved-- on the spot, 1000 miles east, in Nebraska. It was a sort of prehistoric Pompeii, or a La Brea tar pits, but with ash and not tar.
It’s now called the Ashfall Fossil Beds, and the fossil animals are largely left where they fell, for observers to marvel over.
And then in 2003, amateur paleontologist Mike Baldwin nosed around a highway road cut one bitterly cold Nebraska December day, and saw two large vertebrae weathering in the hillside. He’d found a dinosaur fossil in Nebraska; a Plesiosaur.
Scientists claim the Plesiosaur, a long-necked aquatic dinosaur, went extinct 65 million years ago, while Wikipedia speculates about survivors in Loch Ness, Scotland.
I’d incorrectly judged Nebraska’s proclivity for unique fossil finds. There were dinosaur bones, and other incredible relics, secreted just beneath its tarmac-level plains. My only defenses are that I had unusually bad judgment, even for a 10-year-old, and the natural history books were also wrong about no dinosaur fossils found in Nebraska.
After Baldwin unearthed his plesiosaur, the scientists began a recount, and discovered that was actually the 5th plesiosaur found in Nebraska since 1870.
Just the same, I'll always feel that was my Plesiosaur that Baldwin found. That shoulda been my dinosaur. I coulda been a contender.
And now it's your turn, gentle reader, to tell us what you will, about your corner of our beautiful earth.
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