Artist’s reconstruction of the ancient Florissant forest by Rob Wood. NPS.

The July August issue of The Interpreter, a magazine for professional and volunteer interpretive educators, features as its cover story an article by Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument Volunteer Interpretive Specialist Heidi Bailey called “Are Your Stories Lost in Space? Interpret the Geography of a Place.”

In the article, Bailey uses Florissant as a vivid example of how telling the geographic as well as historical story of a place can enrich interpretation and engage visitors.

Bailey writes

Geography is about visualizing large spaces, getting acquainted with special places, and connecting to the Earth as a whole. The places and spaces around us are integral to our lives and should play a significant role in the stories we tell.

Bailey provides concrete activities that interpreters can use in their work. She can be contacted at hbailey@fossilbeds.org.

Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument is beginning a long term oral history project. The project will use nearly $800.00 of professional audio recording equipment purchased by the Friends of the Florissant Fossils Beds.

The goal of this project is to record the stories related to the different aspects of the Monument’s history, which may include Native American history, settlers and the Hornbek Homestead, the commercial fossil and tourist operations, farming and ranching, the founding of the Monument, and the first few decades of the Monument’s history.

The new equipment allows the Monument to record conversations in person or over the phone so people who live far from the Monument may be interviewed. The stories will be recorded, transcribed, and stored. They will be available to researchers and portions of them may be used on the Monument’s website or in exhibits. The Monument staff would like to thank the Friends for their support in helping us preserve the stories and history of this amazing national park area.

Jack Williams, the second superintendent of the Monument, will be the first person to be interviewed. The Monument is compiling a list of additional people involved in the park’s history to interview. If you are one of these people or know someone who should be interviewed, please contact Jeff Wolin or Shawn Frizzell at the Monument at 719-748-3253 or flfo_information@nps.gov.

-Jeff Wolin, Lead Interpretive Ranger
Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument

Photo Credit: Melissa Barton

Dr. Rodeck’s donation and the matching federal funds amount to $75,000 for designing and installing wayside panels along the Petrified Forest Loop (which includes the Big Stump and the Scudder Pit Interpretive Site), one of the park’s most popular trails. Jean Rodeck and Lead Interpretive Ranger Jeff Wolin will both be involved in designing the exhibits, which the park hopes will be installed by summer of 2009.

-Melissa Barton

Photo Credit: Melissa Barton

Kathy Salas (left) and Eva Lyon (right) show off their certificates with Dr. Herb Meyer, the park paleontologist.

Friday was the last day for summer paleontology interns Kathy Salas (University of Texas–Dallas) and Eva Lyon (College of Wooster). During their time here, they accomplished many projects for the park, including

• Overhauling the park’s Inventory & Monitoring Program and retaking all baseline data
• Assisting visiting researchers in the field and hosting the July 28-29 paleontology seminar
• Collecting fossils in South Park for a comparative research project
• Writing site bulletins about the park’s fossils and about resource management and research in the park (available soon in the Visitor Center)
• Assisting interpretive staff with exhibit assembly and other projects
• A complete inventory of the park’s herbarium (modern plant) collection

Summer interns help the park accomplish vital work and we are always sorry to see them go. Best of luck to Kathy and Eva in their future endeavors. The park thanks the Friends of the Florissant Fossil Beds, Inc.  and the Geological Society of America for making many internships possible over the years.

Cockerell’s Contributions Celebrated

Melissa Barton

Naturalist Theodore Dru Alison Cockerell was one of the most prolific researchers to collect at Florissant. He described hundreds of species, many of which still stand today. T.D.A. Cockerell’s interests were broad: he studied plants, insects, and mollusks at Florissant, although his particular interest was in the fossil insects.

This summer marked the centennial of Cockerell’s first collecting expedition to Florissant in the summer of 1906. The expeditions of 1906-1908 collected many of the most spectacular and scientifically interesting fossils to come from the lake shales of Florissant. Today these specimens are scattered through the collections of museums across the country and in Europe, although many remain at the University of Colorado Museum.

Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, in cooperation with the University of Colorado Museum and the Friends of the Florissant Fossil Beds, celebrated the centennial with a wreath-laying ceremony at Columbia Cemetery and reception at the museum on Friday, June 9, followed by speakers, a luncheon, and a field trip to several of Cockerell’s collection sites on Saturday, June 10.

“When I was doing the inventory of all the Florissant collections, I thought this was something we could do when 2006 rolled around,” said Dr. Herb Meyer, the Monument paleontologist. “Why not celebrate the people who made the important contributions long ago?”

Dr. Dena Smith, the Curator of Invertebrate Paleontology at the CU Museum, organized Friday’s events. Both T.D.A. Cockerell and his second wife, Wilmatte Porter Cockerell, are buried at the Columbia Cemetery in Boulder. Meyer and other park employees arranged the wreath, which was donated by the Friends. The wreath contained plants Cockerell collected as fossils at Florissant—redwood, cattail, elderberry, oak, rose, hydrangea—and bees. Although Cockerell was a generalist who studied both fossil and modern plants and animals, bees were his particular research interest—he collected over 900 species of modern bees in Colorado alone.

Jean Rodeck, former superintendent of the Monument, introduced the speakers on Saturday. Her father, Dr. Hugo Rodeck, was encouraged by Cockerell to study biology, and became director of the CU Museum.

“On Dr. Cockerell’s gravestone it says ‘Naturalist—Humanitarian—Teacher,’ and I really feel that ‘mentor’ should be added to that,” said Rodeck, who followed in her father’s footsteps. “I would not be here if it were not for T.D.A. Cockerell.”

Keynote speaker Dr. William A. Weber, Professor Emeritus of Natural History at the CU Museum, only met Cockerell once, when Hugo Rodeck took him to the Cockerells’ house for dinner. “I was not impressed,” Weber said. “He didn’t say one word.” Today Weber is Cockerell’s most enthusiastic admirer.

“It turns out that I have followed the kind of career Cockerell recommended,” Weber said with a smile, “that scientists diverge from their main interests every 20 years or so.” One of Weber’s long-term interests turned out to be Cockerell. Over the past several years, Weber has collected and published three volumes of Cockerell’s letters and essays, as well as a biobibliography.

When CU dismantled Cockerell’s office to save space, Weber rescued all of the papers and stored them in the library until the Archives were established. Weber and his assistants ultimately spent years transcribing Cockerell’s letters and hunting down papers for the biobibliography.

Cockerell “practically invented Darwin for America,” according to Weber, who also noted that Cockerell was an early environmentalist, probably the first person to write about ships dumping oil at sea.

“I’m bubbling over today about this whole thing,” Weber said of the events.

Meyer spoke about Cockerell’s contributions to paleobotany at Florissant, emphasizing the process of science. Cockerell corrected identifications by earlier scientists, some of which have since been corrected and some of which are still valid. Cockerell himself believed that a good scientist corrected his own “likely to be numerous” errors.

Cockerell also thought beyond North America and Europe when making identifications, and was one of the first to think in terms of an ecological mosaic around the lake. Perhaps most significantly, Cockerell began a longstanding relationship between the University of Colorado and the Florissant Fossil Beds.

Smith first learned about Florissant from Cockerell’s papers, and ultimately conducted her doctoral research at the Monument. While largely forgotten in other fields, Cockerell is still widely known and respected among entomologists, largely for his development of identification “characters” for fossil insects.

“Cockerell had to deal with flattened fossils,” Smith said, “so he couldn’t use traditional entomology techniques.”

Cockerell thought about the types of characters that would best be preserved as fossils, and in the process realized that many fossil insects actually belong to modern genera. Many of these characters are still used by paleoentomologists today to identify fossil insects.

But Cockerell wasn’t just a taxonomist. “He was interested in broader evolutionary patterns,” Smith said. “That wasn’t how things were done back then. He set the foundations for those of us who came later.”

Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument and the Friends of the Florissant Fossil Beds honored Weber with a certificate in recognition of his work in preserving and sharing Cockerell’s legacy. The Archives, University of Colorado Libraries, recently finished a catalogue for the papers which Weber saved from Cockerell’s office.

Following the luncheon, Meyer led a field trip with Beth Simmons and myself to some of Cockerell’s collection sites in and around the Monument, including the productive and seldom-visited “Station 14” in the northwestern corner of the Monument and the railroad cut east of town where the “flower car” of the Colorado Midland Railway Co. used to stop to allow tourists to collect fossils and wildflowers.

After a stop at a fossil site near the Florissant cemetery, the trip ended with an excursion to the Big Stump, the most famous fossil redwood visible in the park. Four of Cockerell’s collection sites were located nearby.

The celebrations were a great success, although Cockerell himself would probably have been a bit embarrassed by all the acclaim. Now it’s time to mark calendars for the Harry D. MacGinitie centennial in 2036.

Suggested Reading

The American Cockerell: A Naturalist’s Life, 1866-1948, edited by William A. Weber (2000).

The Valley of the Second Sons: Letters of Theodore Dru Alison Cockerell, a young English naturalist, writing to his sweetheart and her brother about his life in West Cliff, Wet Mountain Valley, Colorado, 1887-1890, edited by William A. Weber (2004).

Theodore Dru Alison Cockerell, 1866-1948 (biobibliography), by William A. Weber (1965).

The Fossils of Florissant, by Herbert W. Meyer (2003).

A paper about the scientific history of Florissant, including Cockerell’s work, will appear in an upcoming Geological Society of America Special Paper, “Paleontology of the Upper Eocene Florissant Formation”, edited by Herb Meyer and Dena Smith. More information will be posted here as it becomes available; the volume is scheduled for release in December 2007 or January 2008.

Photo Credits

“An enumeration of the localities in the Florissant Basin, from which fossils were obtained in 1906,” by T.D.A. Cockerell (1907), in Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History (historic photos of Fossil Stump Hill and the Florissant Valley)
Melissa Barton (all others)

In honor of National Park Week (April 22-29) and the first National Junior Ranger Day (April 27), Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument announced that its Junior Ranger Program will now be free. This decision has been made possible with assistance from the Friends and the Rocky Mountain Nature Association.

The park’s Junior Ranger Program consists of a book of activities to complete, after which the participant can choose either a Junior Ranger badge or a patch showing a paper wasp, possibly the park’s most iconic fossil.

Since the park is installing new exhibits, the Junior Ranger booklet will need to be updated. Last summer’s Teacher-Ranger-Teacher, Greg Spalding, has been hired to revise and coordinate the Junior Ranger Program this summer.

A park ranger of tomorrow

While many young visitors to parks participate in Junior Ranger Programs, few are as enthusiastic as Chandler Johnson of Rome, Georgia. After participating in her first Junior Ranger program at Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, she has gone on to complete over 100 Junior Ranger Programs.

Johnson wears a vest covered with Junior Ranger badges and patches when she visits national parks. She hopes one day to complete every offered Junior Ranger Program. Johnson enjoys hiking and viewing wayside exhibits, and believes it is important to respect our national parks.

“I believe the country should know that national parks, historic sites, and recreational areas are all very cool places that our nation has made for us,” she says. “Go visit some of the national parks and learn something new!”

-Melissa Barton

“A park ranger of tomorrow” is based on an article by Norton Canfield, Park Guide at Harry S. Truman National Historic Site.
Photo Credit: Larry Villalva, Superintendent at Harry S. Truman National Historic Site.

On Wednesday, training included a tour outside the park, beginning with a visit to overlook the Thirtynine Mile volcanic field, which includes the Guffey volcanic center, now deeply eroded. Guffey may have produced the lahars (volcanic mud and debris flows) that dammed ancient Lake Florissant.

The next stop was a roadcut near Evergreen Station, which passes through one of the lahar deposits. Here you can see chunks of Cripple Creek Granite and other rocks carried along by the lahar.

The Barksdale Picnic Area, located in the park off Lower Twin Rock Road, is one of the most accessible places to see the Wall Mountain Tuff, a volcanic rock which underlies the Florissant Formation.

The day finished with a trip to the privately owned Florissant Fossil Quarry, so seasonals could split some shale for themelves. They found some small plant fossils, including redwood needles and Fagopsis leaves.

You can take the driving tour yourself by following the directions in A Roadside Guide to the Volcanic Beginnings of Ancient Lake Florissant or “Field guide to the paleontology and volcanic setting of the Florissant fossil beds, Colorado,” by Herbert W. Meyer, Steven W. Veatch, and Amanda Cook (available at the park’s visitor center for $3.00), which includes stops within the park as well. The Barksdale Picnic Area (Stop 2), Evergreen Station (Stop 3), and the Thirtynine Mile Volcanic-Field Overlook (Stop 5) are all stops on the Gold Belt Byway Tour as well, described in Geologic Guidebook to the Gold Belt Byway, Colorado, by Thomas W. Henry, Emmett Evanoff, Danial A. Grenard, Herbert W. Meter, and David M. Vardiman (2004), available for $19.95 at the visitor center.

-Melissa Barton

Photo Credits: Melissa Barton

More Gold Belt Byway Posts:

• Stops 4, 17, 18: Dome Rock and the Shelf Road
• Stops 12, 14, 15, 16: Garden Park and Skyline Drive Fossil Sites
• Stops 19, 20, 21: Indian Springs Trace Fossil Site and Phantom Canyon