Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park

Photo: License:

The Ashfall Fossil Beds are rare fossil site types called lagerst�tten that, due to extraordinary local conditions, capture a moment in time ecological "snapshot" in a range of well-preserved fossilized organisms.

Ash from a Yellowstone hotspot eruption 10-12 million years ago created these fossilized bone beds. The Ashfall Fossil Beds are especially famous for fossils of mammals from the middle Miocene geologic epoch. The Ashfall Fossil Beds are stratigraphically part of the Serravallian-age Ogallala Group.

The first hint of the site's richness was the skull of a juvenile rhinoceros noticed in 1971 eroding out of a gully at the edge of a cornfield. In 1971, University of Nebraska State Museum paleontologist Michael Voorhies was walking with his wife Jane through a series of gullies on Melvin Colson�s farm in northeastern Nebraska and made this discovery.

Newly uncovered fossils are being left exactly as they are found: specially constructed walkways afford visitors an unobstructed close-up view of paleontologists at work during the summer field season.