October 7, 2010

Thursday 7~~~~We left Colorado Springs this morning headed to Montrose, Colorado. It was about a 296 mile drive to our campground. I packed us our usual lunch and we stopped and ate it before we arrived at the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument. This area has yielded over 50,000 museum specimens from fossils of over 1700 species; 1500 insects, 150 plants and one of the world's only known fossil records of the tsetse fly, now found only in equatorial Africa. Here no big bones stick out of the ground, but delicate fossil insect wings and finely veined leaves lurk beneath your feet petrified in the paper thin shale. Fossil insect sites are far more rare than fossil plant sites which adds to the global significance of the Florissant Fossil Beds. We hiked in to see these beds because we were told there was a Park Ranger excavating in the area and we thought that would be interesting. We found the ranger, but he wasn't excavating, he was in the spot where they do excavating, but as he explained they don't excavate where the public is, because they wouldn't get anything done with all the people and questions and keeping an eye on them to keep them out of their work area. That made sense to us, so we looked at his specimens he had in glass cases and we listened to some of his story and we left him telling the crowd more about the specimens and how they find them. I think I like the big rocks and cliffs a lot better than insects in boxes. You don't think of Redwood trees growing in Colorado; Simular redwoods now grow only in a thin belt on the California and Oregon coasts but exist here as fossil stumps, many still beneath the valley floor. We took a picture of one of the larger petrified redwood stumps in the park. They hav graveled paths you walk on and they encourage you to sty on them because the fields are full of these fossils and you would disturb or ruin them if you didn't know what you were looking for.