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Museums, Visitor Centers, and Other Exhibits
It is not always feasible to make fossil sites in national park areas accessible to the public. The fossils in some parks are very fragile and would be destroyed if left exposed to the elements. In these cases, exhibits of fossils in a museum or visitor center facility may provide opportunities to see fossils. In other parks, the fossils are located in hazardous areas that are not safe for public visitation, or the fossil site has been excavated and there is little to see.
Some parks have either stand-alone paleontological exhibits or fossils and associated exhibits in their visitor centers. A few parks even have working fossil preparation labs where members of the public can view paleontologists at work. Thirteen parks with public exhibits are highlighted below.
NPS Photo by Jason Gray.
Agate Fossil Beds National Monument, Nebraska
Agate Fossil Beds National Monument’s visitor center tells the paleontological story of the monument. It includes bone fossils, trace fossils (such as the spiral beaver burrow Daemonelix, “Devil’s Corkscrew”), and a diorama made with casts of fossils recovered from Agate’s bone quarries. The visitor center includes interactive exhibits as well as a 12-minute video. These comprehensive educational exhibits allow visitors to travel back in time to envision what western Nebraska looked like about 20 million years ago.
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- Agate Fossil Beds—Indoor Activities
- Agate Fossil Beds—Fossils and Paleontology of Agate Fossil Beds
- Agate Fossil Beds—What Animals Roamed Here?
Badlands National Park, South Dakota
The Fossil Preparation Lab in the Ben Reifel Visitor Center in the North Unit of Badlands National Park is a working paleontological laboratory that gives visitors the chance to watch paleontologists at work and interact with them. The Prep Lab is typically open daily during the summer months. Museum exhibits in the Visitor Center provide information on fossils found in the park.
The Fossil Exhibit Trail is located about five miles from the Visitor Center. It is a self-guided, fully accessible boardwalk featuring fossil replicas and exhibits about the prehistoric animals that once lived in the area about 35 to 25 million years ago, during the Eocene and Oligocene. It is an excellent way to learn about the paleontology of the park set within the Badlands landscape where the fossils are found.
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Big Bend National Park, Texas
The Fossil Discovery Center eight miles north of Panther Junction along the Persimmon Gap Entrance Road is a self-guided fossil exhibit that gives an overview of the paleontological resources of Big Bend National Park. The exhibit covers 130 million years of geologic time and the changing life during that interval. Replicas of fossils found in the park as well as artwork tell the park’s geologic story. The exhibit is fully accessible and a nearby shaded picnic area contains many fossil-themed climbing structures for children.
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Channel Islands National Park, California
A cast of a pygmy mammoth is on display in the Robert J. Lagomarsino Visitor Center in Channel Islands National Park. During the Pleistocene Ice Ages, lower sea levels the four northern Channel Islands were connected as one large island, Santarosae. Mammoths from the mainland occasionally swam to Santarosae and established a population there. The mammoths living on island became dwarfed due to the restricted land area and available resources, producing “pygmy mammoths” better adapted to their setting. The pygmy mammoths stood about 6.5 feet tall at the shoulder and were much smaller than their ancestors, with limbs that were better suited for steep island terrain. The pygmy mammoth skeleton on display is a cast of the most complete skeleton ever found, discovered on Santa Rosa Island in 1994.
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Dinosaur National Monument, Utah
The Quarry Exhibit Hall contains the famous “wall of bones,” with 1,500 fossils exposed in situ in a rock face. It also contains a variety of exhibits and mounted dinosaur skeletons to provide further information about the paleontology of the bone bed in Dinosaur National Monument. The nearby Quarry Visitor Center also has information on the park’s paleontology.
The Quarry Exhibit Hall and Visitor Center are located near Jenson, Utah. The park facilities in Colorado do not have fossil exhibits.
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Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, Colorado
NPS photo by Justin Tweet.
The famed insect and plant fossils of Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument are too fragile for a permanent in situ exhibit. Once exposed to the elements, they are rapidly weathered away. Therefore, it is best to exhibit them in a protected setting. The Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument Visitor Center has many insect and plant fossils on display, along with a theater and educational exhibits. During the summer, a yurt serves as a fossil learning lab with hands-on activities for families and kids.
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Fossil Butte National Monument, Wyoming
More than 2,000 fossils are on display in the Fossil Butte National Monument Visitor Center, which is also the only location in the monument for members of the public to see fossils. Fossils on display include those of fish, turtles, mammals, reptiles, birds, insects, and plants (leaves, flowers, and seeds), as well as coprolites (fossil dung). Along with several dioramas, these fossils show what Fossil Lake was like approximately 52 million years ago during the Eocene.
The2.5-mile Historic Quarry Trail has trailside exhibits about the monument’s geology and paleontology, although no fossils can be viewed during the hike.
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Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona
Exhibits containing fossils along with other geologic information are available in the Yavapai Geology Museum and the nearby Trail of Time on the South Rim of Grand Canyon National Park.
The Yavapai Geology Museum, perched on the edge of Grand Canyon on the South Rim, tells the canyon’s full geologic story, including that of its fossil record.
The Trail of Time is an outdoor exhibit on the South Rim that places the major events of Grand Canyon’s geologic history along a geologic timeline. The full trail is 2.83 miles long from the Yavapai Geology Museum to Grand Canyon’s historic village. Rock samples and exhibits are placed along the timeline to provide a deep time perspective. Several of the rock samples include fossils such as those of stromatolites and reptile tracks.
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Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument, Idaho
Thousand Springs Visitor Center is the only place for members of the public to see fossils in Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument. The monument is one of the most important Pliocene fossil sites in the world and the visitor center exhibits help people understand what life was like on the shores on ancient Lake Idaho between 4 and 3 million years ago.
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Ice Age National Scenic Trail, Wisconsin
The Ice Age National Scenic Trail in Wisconsin approximately follows the edge of the most recent glaciation in Wisconsin, about 25,000 to 10,000 years ago. The Ice Age Interpretive Center, operated by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, is in Interstate State Park at the western end of the trail. The interpretive center has fossils (including replicas) from mastodons, giant bison, and other animals that lived during the Last Glacial Maximum.
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John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, Oregon
Thomas Condon Visitor Center in the Sheep Rock Unit is a state-of-the-art facility containing a working paleontology lab dedicated to the John Day Fossil Beds as well as museum exhibits with hundreds of fossil specimens on display. Eight large murals in the museum depict what animals and plants looked like at different times in the geologic past of the John Day Basin.
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Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona
The Rainbow Forest Museum is the main space for paleontological exhibits in Petrified Forest National Park. It contains displays of fossils of prehistoric organisms and information about what the Petrified Forest area was like 215 million years ago when the Chinle Formation was being deposited. Other exhibits on the park, including its fossils, are in the Painted Desert Visitor Center. The visitor center also hosts the Museum Demonstration Lab, where visitors can watch specimen preparation and talk with staff.
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Theodore Roosevelt National Park, North Dakota
The South Unit Visitor Center in Theodore Roosevelt National Park hosts artifacts from Roosevelt's presidency and time in the badlands, as well as exhibits on the paleontology of the park. Two of the most prominent specimens are a large petrified stump of a bald cypress tree and a mounted specimen of Champsosaurus, a crocodile-like reptile. A mural and other fossils help visitors imagine and understand the swampy environment that existed here about 60 million years ago, where the badlands now are.
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Fossils from National Parks on Display in Other Museums
Fossils collected from national parks are on display in museums in many parts of the country. Sometimes, the fossils were collected before the sites become part of the National Park System, such as the quarry site in what is now Dinosaur National Monument that was excavated by the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in the early 1990s. In other circumstances, fossils collected in national park areas are curated by outside (nnn-NPS) museums that have more appropriate facilities to house fossils. Overall, many more fossils collected in parks are in museums’ collections than are on public display.A few of the highlights of NPS fossils on public display in major museums around the country include:
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Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh has an important historic collection of fossils from Agate Fossil Beds National Monument and Dinosaur National Monument.
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The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago has the best collection and exhibit of Green River Formation fossils, which are tied to Fossil Butte National Monument.
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The Museum of Geology of the South Dakota School of Mines has important collection and exhibits tied to Badlands National Park.
Many other museums have one or more specimens from NPS areas on display. What fossils may be on display at any time changes because museums refresh their exhibits from time to time, putting some specimens in storage and bringing out others.
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Last updated: October 11, 2024