hagerman fossil beds and equus simplicidens and clemmys owyheensis

On the second day of my Western trip (June 16) to Cheyenne, Denver and Western Kansas, I left Boise before 8:00 a.m. to head to Kemmerer, WY. The trip is normally about an 7-8 hour drive, if you take the Interstate, but I wanted to wander a bit and see what I could find. My initial plans called for me to veer north about 90 miles East of Boise to visit the Craters of the Moon National Monument. I had been there once before and thought that refreshing my understanding of this unusual geological formation would be the order of the day. So, I took exit 141 from I-84 and then noticed the sign for a "Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument." I hadn't heard of this monument previously, and decided to travel 8 miles along old US 30 to the small town of Hagerman to discover what these "Fossil Beds" were. Two hours later I sat in my car, barely able to comprehend what was, to me, one of the great and relatively undiscovered fossil patches in the US. The Hagerman Beds only became a National Monument in 1988, and the Monument is still not fully developed, either in its visitor center or the drive around the 4,394 acre Monument. But what can be learned is enough to whet the apetite of even the most amateur explorer.

Envisioning the Monument

High above the Snake River in Western Central Idaho, outisde the town of Hagerman, are 600 foot high cliffs, which paleontologists tell us were formed as a result of the so-called Bonneville Floods of about 15,000 years ago. The rock formations had been there for millions of years; they only first appeared as cliffs after these floods. In the stratigraphic layers of the cliffs are 600,000 years of geologic time, going back to the Pliocene era (about 3 million years ago). In the late 1920s, an Idaho farmer/rancher informed a scientist from the US Geological Survey that he had discovered some fossil bones on his land. After several years of investigation in what is now known as the "Horse Quarry," scientists identified five nearly completed skeletons, more than 100 skulls and 48 lower jaws as well as numerous isolated bones of an animal that came to be known as the Hagerman Horse (Equus simplicidens). This is the largest concentration of fossilized horses in North America. The "horse" find is one of the six most important sites in the world for understanding the evolution and paleobiology of fossil horses. Actually, paleontologists conclude that the Hagerman Horse bears a closer resemblance to the "Grevy's Zebra" than to a modern Thoroughbred, but there was no way of telling whether the Equus simplicidens was striped. Oh, by the way, the Hagerman Horse is the "official fossil" of the State of Idaho. Isn't that cool, to have a "state fossil?"

Exploration in the area continued, and now the Hagerman Fossil Beds contain/protect the world's richest known fossil deposits from the late Pliocene era. To date 105 vertebrate species, 38 invertebrate species (such as clams and snails) and 35 plant species have been identified. Forty-four of these species were first identified here and seven are found nowhere else. One of the more recent discovered was the Clemmys owyheensis (pond turtle) from 2000. But even more recently than the "official publications" that you can pick up from the Visitor Center are reports of a mastodon tusk that has been discovered on BLM land not far from the Monument. Paleontologists are still uncertain whether the fossil is a Gomphothere, which is found only in AZ, NV and Southern CA; if one or more was also to be identified in Idaho, they would have to rewrite the history of the mastodon. Park Service paleontologist Phil Gensler says that more than 3,000 fossils per year are discovered in the Monument; finding the mastodon's tusk might renew efforts to launch a largescale dig in the area in the future.

Lots of Questions

I am no geologist, paleontologist, sedimentologist, plant or species biologist or anything of the kind, but their work provokes questions that need addressing. The major question is "how do you know, and how do you construct the 'time line' for these fossils?" Here is the reason why this question becomes rather burning. We all know that in the last 20 or so years the American Evangelical movement has reached unprecedented power. Sometimes it is hard to distinguish between Evangelicals and Fundamentalists, and all are certainly not the same, but we have seen the repercussions in American public life in the last several years of the influence of this seemingly new "bloc" of power. At present they are moving into political power and taking over the Republican party. But what most people do not know is that the agenda for the next generation is not simply to take over these visible expressions of culture, but also to begin to "reclaim" science from the "atheists."

One of the ways that this is most visible today is the debate over including the theory of evolution in high school biology textbooks. There really is no other viable theory of species development now, but within a generation, I believe, science will be forced to reconceptualize how it looks at its distant past because Evangelical scholars will begin to move into more prominent places in the academy than they currently occupy. I believe that a very smart Evangelical scholar, who could expose the thinness of some of the hypotheses on which the "history" of the geological record are based, will arise in the next decade. And, when that happens, all of paleontology will begin to be up for grabs. I do not expect that "young earth" paleontologists will dominate (that the world was created a little over 6,000 years ago), but there will be the return to theories of catastrophism that are seemingly more consistent with some of the biblical stories (e.g., Noah's flood) than is uniformitariansim.

Thus, as I see it, despite the find of all these fascinating fossils, the "battle for the fossils" is just heating up. Not even heating up. It is still not even a glint in anyone's eyes. But it is coming. One of the ironies is that the natural place where some of this thinking will arise or be most welcomed are the places where the fossils are. That is, UT, WY and ID, where the incomparable finds are all around you, testifying to striking antiquity, will be more than hospitable climates to theories of the young(er) date of the earth. So this leads to a closing desideratum: to try to understand enough of the issues that lie behind the theories of evolutionary development to know fully how firmly rooted and well-supported these theories are. Indeed, there are lots of people who make lots of money off the theories as they are, and I don't expect them to be very hospitable to challenges to their regnant theories and abundant federal dollars. But evolutionary theory must be explained more clearly, more simply, more accessibly. If not, the next word belongs to the Evangelicals/Fundamentalists.

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