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Seemingly barren federal lands turn out to be fertile ground for fossils

Posted on: Sunday, 22 February 2004, 06:00 CST

Seemingly barren federal lands turn out to be fertile ground for fossils

By GUY GUGLIOTTA Washington Post

Sunday, February 22, 2004

Private citizens homesteaded the best farm and ranch land long ago. Then the federal government closed off the most beautiful land and made it into parks and preserves, under the National Park Service and the Forest Service. The rest -- much of it windblown badlands, parched desert or other remote corners of nowhere -- went to the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management.

But while the bureau's public land may have started out as leftovers that no one else wanted, it has turned out to be prime territory for paleontology -- fossil hunting and the unearthing of dinosaurs and other ancient creatures.

"These are barren, eroded areas, with very little soil, so the surface geology is exposed," Mike O'Neill said. "And since it doesn't rain much, the bones don't decompose. They're encased in the rock."

O'Neill, 63, is the Bureau of Land Management's senior paleontologist, one of five the agency has on staff to manage research, deter fossil poaching and prevent destruction of fossil beds on 261 million acres of public land, most of it in 12 Western states.

Over the years, the bureau has produced several spectacular finds: 11-foot mammoth tusks near Las Cruces, N.M.; huge tortoise fossils and armadillo-like shells from a 15 million-year-old fossil bed in Arizona; the remains of an entire marine ecosystem at Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument; and the bones of a 14- foot, meat-eating Albertosaurus whose skull was encased in a 1,000- pound block of stone that had to be cut from an escarpment near Farmington, N.M., and flown to a flatbed truck.

And in 1981, on public land 40 miles west of Albuquerque, N.M., paleontologists discovered the 150 million-year-old remains of Seismosaurus, one of the largest and, at more than 130 feet, probably the longest dinosaur ever found.

"It took 10 years just to recover it," O'Neill said. Seismosaurus' reconstructed skeleton has visited Japan twice for an exhibition of the world's largest dinosaurs, and is destined for display at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque.

O'Neill said the bureau's concern for its fossils began to grow in the 1970s, when energy shortages prompted renewed interest in coal, along with traditional oil and gas prospecting.

"Unfortunately, a lot of the coal areas also contained fossils," O'Neill said. "We set out to inventory the fossils."

Also, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 required all federal land agencies to assume stewardship for the resources under their purview, he said. Today, the Bureau of Land Management has more than 100 "administrative set-asides" -- land reserved for paleontological research -- and routinely calls for environmental impact statements to assess new mining ventures.

Before the coal-mining boomlet, bureau land was known mostly for grazing, mineral mining and rough-country tourism, where families could look for tiny fossils in cliff-side scree while hiking.

"I was hired full time in 1979 and went to Farmington to manage the fossil resources at a time when there was a lot of coal and natural gas prospecting," O'Neill said. "Since then, the paleontology program has grown and become very visible."

This is because of "positive things that have happened," he said, including discoveries, movies and documentaries that have focused attention on dinosaurs and paleontology. Today, the bureau has issued almost 300 permits to researchers to find and dig fossil sites. But a number of poachers don't have permits and dig anyway, O'Neill said, typically "high-grading" sites by taking the marketable fossils and trashing the rest.

"We don't really have a handle on it," O'Neill said. "There's a small amount in New Mexico, but quite a lot in Utah, Wyoming and Montana." Prosecutions are "very difficult, because you have to catch someone red-handed," a difficult task in fossil country.

"The areas are so vast and underpopulated you can go out for a couple of days, dig something up, get away and never see anyone," O'Neill said.

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