A Long Time Coming: A Shared Paleontologist Comes to the Southern Network

Article by Lauren Parry-Joseph, Park Ranger, Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument
for Park Paleontology Newsletter, Fall 2024

Changes are Coming

Persistence and patience are key when it comes to managing fossils from America’s National Parks. Some important pursuits in paleontology, like field excavations and researching new species, are inherently interesting and inspirational to most people. The vital work that often goes unnoticed, or is just characteristically less magnetic, involves years of careful efforts behind the scenes. Doing this essential work in inventories, funding, and law and policy is very complex and time consuming; there are a lot of needs and moving pieces without a robust permanent staff to support the National Park Service (NPS) Paleontology Program. While there are approximately 275 archeologists employed today by the NPS, there are only about 20 staff paleontologists nationwide. This year, a big change came to the Southern Network parks: for the first time, the NPS hired a shared paleontologist to support multiple parks in the same region.

Dr. Aubrey Bonde began her four-year term as the Southern Network Paleontologist in May 2024.

NPS Photo by L. Parry.

Dr. Aubrey Bonde was selected as the Southern Network Paleontologist to support five parks throughout Southern Nevada and California: Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument, Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Death Valley National Park, Great Basin National Park, and Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. Vince Santucci, Senior Paleontologist for the NPS, planted the seed for such a position nearly ten years ago. During his four-month tenure as the first acting Superintendent for Tule Springs Fossil Beds in 2015, he gained a deeper awareness for the needs and challenges these Southern Network parks faced: “I went forward and proposed this idea: ‘Hey, what if we did a cost share to benefit multiple parks?’…So there were about five years of communication where everybody seemed to think that was a good way to go, but nobody could figure out how to get funding to support it.”

The Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law in 2022, providing a huge influx of funding to NPS environmental planning, climate resilience, and conservation projects. The opportunity to fund a shared network paleontologist was finally realized; but why start with the Southern Network? To Vince Santucci, the Southern Network “…stands above and beyond any other network in terms of the need, just based on the numbers, you’ve got a whole collection of parks that are all rich in paleontological resources, lacking in many cases the staff expertise to address and support them the way that they should be addressed.” He points out that “there are more parks [in this network] that have paleontology referenced in their enabling legislation than in any of the other 32 networks across the agency…By virtue of that fact, it was an easy choice.”

History of Life in the Southern Network Parks

^{Stories of ancient seas connect across the Southern Network Parks. (Left) Cambrian-age Nephrolenellus trilobites from Death Valley National Park [Scale bar squares are 1cm each]. Exoskeletons were a revolutionary adaptation for sea creatures over 500 million years ago. Trilobites, like living arthropods, shed their exoskeletons to grow, leaving them behind on the seafloor to preserve as fossils. (Right) Middle-Ordovician-age tabulate corals Eofletcheria utahia at Great Basin National Park [Quarter is ~2.5 cm in diameter]. These colonial animals built reefs in the shallow waters of an ancient sea ~470 million years ago. Both trilobites and tabulate corals disappeared from the world’s oceans following the Permian-Triassic mass-extinction event ~252 million years ago.
NPS Photos by J. Tweet, G. Bell.}

Aubrey Bonde is no stranger to the fossil resources within the Southern Network: “I've spent the last 20 or so years working on various projects involving fossils on public land…I'm passionate about fossils, telling unique stories, and I'm also passionate about how NPS serves as the guardians of those stories.” She remarks that the fossil records of these five parks are not siloed, but “rather they're connected and tell a long story of change through tectonics and ocean levels and landscape and life over the southwestern margin of North America.” Death Valley preserves fossils from approximately 600 million years ago, an important chapter in the history of life on Earth when early multicellular organisms developed new forms and novel roles in their environment. The fossil record of Death Valley also captures complete sequences of fossil-bearing Paleozoic rocks, including 520-million-year-old trilobites and Devonian armored jawless fish. Aubrey draws comparisons between these five parks, watching the history of life unfold: “…that record at Death Valley correlates to a similar Paleozoic record at Lake Mead and at Great Basin. So, the stories overlap, and I love that… Some Mesozoic rocks that are preserved at Death Valley also correspond with rocks at Lake Mead and at Santa Monica [Mountains]. And then that progresses into a much higher resolution record of Cenozoic deposits that call in all five parks.” These continuous and overlapping fossil records allow the NPS to interpret the history of life on Earth with more detail and confidence. Additionally, some of these Southern Network parks manage fossils with extraordinary preservation quality; Miocene fossil fish from Santa Monica Mountains are preserved with their articulated skeletons, fins, and scales intact, as if they just washed ashore.

^{Exceptionally preserved Miocene-age fish from Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area in the collections of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, CA (LACM). Clockwise from top left: Sarda Sarda stocki (LACM 1035 / 1059 HOLOTYPE), Hipposyngnathus imporcitor (LACM 326/12055 HOLOTYPE), mackerel scad Decapterus sp. (LACM 317-a/25089), drum Lompoquia sp. (LACM 1938/11675), manefish Chalcidichthys malacopterygius (LACM (CIT) 317/10228 HOLOTYPE), herring Xyne grex (LACM 5768/150210), and scorpionfish Scorpaena ensiger (LACM (CIT) 317/10226). The shaded part of the scale bar is 10 cm.
NPS Photos by A. Koch.}

While the fossil records of these parks record the dynamic evolution of marine life for hundreds of millions of years, they also document how water and life shaped the terrestrial landscape. Aubrey became familiar with the extensive fossil record of Lake Mead when she completed their Paleontological Resource Inventory in 2018 through the NPS Scientists in Parks program. As it remains today, Lake Mead is a hot spot for studying a dynamic environment in the face of global climate change; Triassic conifer forests and rivers gave way to an arid dune field that covered most of the Colorado Plateau during the Jurassic period. The Cenozoic fossil records of Lake Mead and Death Valley also preserve exceptional trackways from large mammals, like big cats and camels, and birds, like herons. Previously, Aubrey worked with Death Valley to develop a monitoring program for the renowned Copper Canyon track locality. Trace fossils help us understand not just who these ancient animals were, but also what they were doing. Two of these parks, Tule Springs Fossil Beds and Death Valley, capture an incredibly precise record of Pleistocene wetlands that waxed and waned in response to global climate changes. Aubrey completed an inventory of new fossil sites for Tule Springs Fossil Beds in 2022. These wetlands were lush habitats for a diverse fauna including megafaunal herbivores, like Columbian mammoths and camels, big cats, birds, mollusks, small rodents, reptiles, and fish. The Ice Age record of Great Basin tells a complementary story of life within glaciated mountains and valleys, preserved primarily as cave deposits. Studying fossils of animals and plants that recently became extinct or survived adversity and extinction helps us protect our modern environments for generations to come. Interpreting such a broad and diverse paleontological record can be overwhelming, yet awe-inspiring; Aubrey remarks that “the fossils we find in the parks are just one snapshot in this moment in time, of the many different forms and the many different ages of life being preserved in the rocks that we see today around us; but many more have existed and many, many more are yet to be found.”

^{Pleistocene paleontology in Southern Nevada below and above ground: (Left) Paleontologist Gorden Bell sieves sediment for fossils in Snake Creek Cave at Great Basin National Park. (Right) Paleontologist Aubrey Bonde collects a partial Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) tooth from a historic excavation quarry at Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument.
NPS photos.}

Up for the Challenge

Over the next four years, the Southern Network Paleontologist has a lot on her plate: “I anticipate sort of multitasking my way through this challenge,” Aubrey laughs. Not one to remain idle, the NPS Paleontology Program has laid a solid foundation over many years through resource inventory reports and field or museum collection-based projects. These efforts identified both the breadth of fossil resources at these Southern Network parks and the needs for management, research, and interpretation. “And so that's one of the great things,” Aubrey observes, “is that even though that base is there, this position now is a chance to follow through on those recommendations.” One of her goals for her four-year term includes streamlining paleontology data into consistent, centralized databases across all five parks. Aubrey is confident that “this position will spotlight modern management techniques for fossil sites and collections…These parks can't protect what they don't even know that they have. Some of these records have been lost or overlooked for decades!” Vince Santucci hopes that this new position will reinvigorate the interest in fossils to resource managers and interpreters at each of the five parks; bringing these stories out of the shadows to inspire this generation and the next.

^{While body fossils preserve living things after death, trace fossils are snapshots of ancient creatures while they were still alive. (Left) Late Miocene-age bird tracks from Lake Mead National Recreation Area. The shaded part of the scale bar is 10 cm. (Right) Paleontologists Matt Ferlicchi and Aubrey Bonde wrap trace fossils for safe transport at Death Valley National Park. It is challenging to collect trace fossils because they are often on large and heavy slabs of rock that are sensitive to erosion. Most NPS trackway sites are monitored by paleontologists in the field to document change through time and any vandalism or theft.
NPS Photos by A. Bonde.}

Future of Network Paleontology

This shared network position has been a highly anticipated way to fulfill recently passed landmark legislation. For 30 years, fossil resources were not protected at the federal level in the same way that archeological resources were. Since his start as a Paleontologist and Law Enforcement Park Ranger, Vince Santucci has demonstrated his resolve and dedication to these nonrenewable resources. “Since I've been involved in paleontology in the Park Service for 40 years, I know that things are slow to come,” Vince reflects, “but with persistence, they eventually do…I can think back to 1985 and I’m scratching my head when I'm observing law enforcement not able to do much with fossil theft, to eventually say we really need fossil legislation. And it took a long time, but we finally got it and we're better off.” The Paleontological Resources Preservation Act (PRPA) was signed into law in 2009, mandating agencies, like the NPS, to manage fossil resources using scientific principles and expertise; This includes planning for fossil inventory and monitoring programs and penalizing theft or vandalism of fossil sites on public lands. Despite the accomplishments of the NPS Paleontology Program, to Vince, the 30-year gap means that “we've lagged behind and we have fewer voices in the field that are advocating for the kinds of [paleontological] needs that would benefit us as managers and parks.” Although PRPA was groundbreaking, it is an unfunded mandate. Using cost-effective and creative solutions, like shared network paleontologists, could be the future of NPS Paleontology. Over the next four years, Aubrey’s work as the Southern Network Paleontologist will justify support for this position to continue and provide a model for other networks across the NPS. She predicts that the work is far from complete: “I may inadvertently be opening up many cans of worms in terms of identifying more work to be done,” Aubrey laughs. This focused support and expertise will also allow the NPS Paleontology Program staff to better assist other parks nationwide. That opportunity alone makes Vince light up: “We’re very excited!” While there is a lot of catching up to do, Aubrey looks forward to the opportunity: “I'm just honored to be able to be the person they trust to carry out the role of the shared paleontologist for the Southern Network of parks.”

Related Links

• Death Valley National Park (DEVA), California and Nevada—[DEVA Geodiversity Atlas] [DEVA Park Home] [DEVA npshistory.com]

• Great Basin National Park (GRBA), Nevada—[GRBA Geodiversity Atlas] [GRBA Park Home] [GRBA npshistory.com]

• Lake Mead National Recreation Area (LAKE), Arizona and Nevada—[LAKE Geodiversity Atlas] [LAKE Park Home] [LAKE npshistory.com]

• Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area (SAMO), California—[SAMO Geodiversity Atlas] [SAMO Park Home] [SAMO npshistory.com]

• Tule Springs National Monument (TUSK), Nevada—[TUSK Geodiversity Atlas] [TUSK Park Home] [TUSK npshistory.com]

• NPS—Geologic Time

Fossils and Paleontology