fossil butte national monument and national senior spelling bee and joseph leidy and wilbur clinton knight and union pacific railroad

On Friday morning, June 17, I decided to retrace my steps 10 miles to visit Fossil Butte National Monument before heading down to I-80 for the straight shot to Cheyenne. I wanted to arrive in the capitol city by 4:00, so that I would be able to rest up for the spelling bee. I knew there was a "Family Bee" also on Friday evening at the AARP headquarters before the Saturday competition. I didn't want to participate in this "Family" night, believing that my months of writing and study was all the preparation I needed. So, I showed up Friday evening just to meet some folks and look around. Then, I retreated back to the motel. But, I am getting ahead of myself, so let's start with Fossil Butte National Monument.

Fossil Butte National Monument

I could write forever about this Monument, but I will spare all the details as well as most of the overview. Fossil Butte preserves the intact fossils of about 20 species of fish and many mammals, insects and reptiles mostly from the Eocene Epoch of the Cenozoic Era. A detailed description of all of the finds is here. It might be good for you to learn the various Eras, Periods and Epochs. Maybe I will give a chart sooner or later, but you just have to memorize them. Once you do so, you can talk with an ease that will amaze you. And, one other thing. You ought to learn the Latin nomenclature of the various families, orders, genuses, etc of various plants and animals you meet. It takes some effort, but once you do so, Latin words can roll off your tongue like nursery rhymes. In addition, you learn a lot about the history of the species by understanding the Latin words.

For example, the state fossil of WY, which profuses at Fossil Butte, is the Knightia eocaena (herring). Dr. John Evans first discovered it in 1856 and gave it to Dr. Joseph Leidy of Philadelphia. Leidy then described it and called it Clupea humilis. However, its name was changed 51 years later to Knightia eocaena. Why? Well, the pioneer paleontologist from the University of Wyoming was named Wilbur Clinton Knight (1858-1903). Knight, whose son Samuel Howell Knight was also a famous Wyoming paleontologist who taught at the U of WY for nearly 50 years and was named Wyoming citizen of the century in 1999, amasssed one of the largest collections of Jurassic fossils assembled anywhere in the 19th century. He made a huge impact in the field of paleontology by arranging, beginning in the early 1890s, what he called "Fossil Field Scientific Expeditions," which were 40-day summer excursions into the Wyoming back country for 100 leading paleontologists from around the country. Sponsored by the Union Pacific Railroad, whose tracks traversed some of the most exciting Green River fossil sites, these excursions would be working trips. Many scientists would return to their home states laden with fossils from the great Wyoming finds.

Knight worked tirelessly to promote the fossils in the State of Wyoming, and was committed to build a first-class paleontological museum in Wyoming that would "beat the world." However, he contracted peritonitis at the tender age of 45 in 1903, and died very quickly. In his honor, then, in 1907, Dr. David Starr Jordan, an ichthyologist would would soon become President of Stanford University, rediscribed Leidy's Clupea humilis as Knightia eocaena (from the eocene epoch--about 58-37 million years ago). The name stuck, and the fossil of this herring became the state fossil of Wyoming on May 22, 1987.

But Joseph Leidy, who at first named the herring, also was honored in the history of paleontology by having the crocodile genus Leidyosuchus named after him, as well as the one toed horse Dinohippus leidyanus. He was a medical doctor from Philadelphia (1823-91) and is widely recognized as the founder of vertebrate paleontology. It was usual for the earliest paleontologists to be doctors, since they were the only professionals skilled at understanding anatomy and physiology of humans.

Wow. I see I have just meandered through a few stories about people and haven't even talked at all about the species of eocene fossils found at Fossil Butte. Well, you can't do everything in one trip, or even one essay. But I think I have laid the methodological groundwork here for those who want to build knowledge of paleontology. Learn the terminology. Take a lot of time to learn what the Latinate forms mean. Study the people behind the science (This was one of the reasons why Stephen Jay Gould was such a successful science writer), and then the field will open up to you.

On to Cheyenne

Well, I had to leave Fossil Butte by 10:00 a.m. to be on the road to Cheyenne. I passsed signs to Little America, advertising those wonderful 35 cent ice cream cones. Then, up ahead, on Highway 30 about 15 miles East of Kemmerer, I saw a sight that I hadn't previously seen in Wyoming: an overpass. I thought to myself that this was probably one of the few overpasses in the state. And, the reason I noted it was that as I approached the overpass, I saw a "wide load" pilot car pulled over just before the overpass along with a Wyoming State Trooper car with its blue lights on. Then, I raised my eyes toward the overpass itself, and saw that a very large flat-bed tractor, carrying a tilted-up speed boat, had gotten stuck under the bridge. Yep. As I drove by and looked closely, I saw that beautiful boat lodged firmly right under the bridge. As Maxwell Smart would have said, "Missed by THAT much." Only in Wyoming, I thought.

So I continued on to Cheyenne. It was an uneventful trip, and so I turned on the radio. At any one time you could get about 10 radio stations, eight of which seemed to be Country and the other two being Christian. I didn't listen closely to whether there was the phenomenon of Christian Country. I just decided to turn off the radio and entertain myself by singing in the car. But I didn't do this before I heard some commercials, one of which I won't forget. It advertised a Chinese restaurant in Rock Springs (surely the Chinese are not a huge ethnic group there). Twice in the commerical the hearers were encouraged to come in and partake of the food, which was "velly good." I suppose that with such effortless verisimilitude, the crowds would be beating down the door for egg rolls.

I arrived in Cheyenne a little behind schedule and decided to relax until the Spelling Bee began on Saturday morning.

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