A Shared Paleontologist for Five Parks: The Southern Network's New Post

A first for the Park Service

Managing fossils in national parks takes persistence and patience. Digs and new species capture the imagination, but much of the vital work — inventories, funding, law and policy — happens out of sight over years, and there is little permanent staff to do it. The Park Service employs about 275 archeologists, but only about 20 staff paleontologists nationwide.

In 2024, that began to change: for the first time, the Park Service hired a shared paleontologist to support several parks in one 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 now supports five parks in 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.

Ten years in the making

The idea came from Vince Santucci, the Park Service's senior paleontologist, nearly ten years earlier. As the first acting superintendent of Tule Springs Fossil Beds for four months in 2015, he saw what these parks needed and proposed a cost share to benefit several parks at once. For about five years, "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 of 2022 brought a large infusion of money for Park Service planning, climate resilience and conservation — and finally paid for the post. Why this network first? To Santucci, it "stands above and beyond any other network in terms of the need": parks rich in fossils, often lacking the expertise to care for them. More of its parks name paleontology in their founding legislation than in any of the agency's other 32 networks.

One long story in five parks

Bonde has worked with fossils on public land for some 20 years. The five parks' fossil records, she says, aren't separate — they tell "a long story of change through tectonics and ocean levels and landscape and life over the southwestern margin of North America."

• Death Valley holds fossils from about 600 million years ago, when early multicellular life was trying out new forms, and whole sequences of Paleozoic rock — 520-million-year-old trilobites and Devonian armored jawless fish — that match rocks at Lake Mead and Great Basin. Its Mesozoic rocks match some at Lake Mead and Santa Monica Mountains, and all five parks hold a detailed Cenozoic record. Overlapping records let the Park Service tell the history of life with more detail and confidence.
• Santa Monica Mountains has Miocene fish preserved with skeletons, fins and scales intact, "as if they just washed ashore."
• Lake Mead, whose paleontological inventory Bonde completed in 2018 through the Scientists in Parks program, records Triassic conifer forests and rivers giving way to a Jurassic dune field that covered most of the Colorado Plateau.
• Lake Mead and Death Valley preserve remarkable trackways of big cats, camels and herons; Bonde helped Death Valley set up monitoring at its famous Copper Canyon track site.
• Tule Springs and Death Valley record Pleistocene wetlands that grew and shrank with the climate, home to Columbian mammoths, camels, big cats, birds, mollusks, rodents, reptiles and fish; Bonde inventoried new fossil sites at Tule Springs in 2022. Great Basin's Ice Age record, mostly in caves, tells a companion story of glaciated mountains and valleys.

Left: Cambrian Nephrolenellus trilobites from Death Valley. Right: Middle Ordovician tabulate corals, Eofletcheria utahia, at Great Basin, from reefs built about 470 million years ago. Both groups vanished after the Permian-Triassic mass extinction about 252 million years ago. NPS photos by J. Tweet and G. Bell.

Exceptionally preserved Miocene fish from Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, in the collections of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. NPS photos by A. Koch.

Pleistocene paleontology below and above ground: Gorden Bell sieves for fossils in Snake Creek Cave, Great Basin; Aubrey Bonde collects part of a Columbian mammoth tooth at Tule Springs. NPS photos.

The fossils found in the parks, Bonde says, are "just one snapshot in this moment in time" — and "many, many more are yet to be found."

The work ahead

Years of inventory reports and collection projects have mapped both the fossils and what the parks need. Bonde's term is a chance to act on those recommendations. One goal: bringing each park's paleontology data into consistent, centralized databases. "These parks can't protect what they don't even know that they have," she says; some records have been lost or overlooked for decades. Santucci hopes the post will revive interest in fossils among each park's resource managers and interpreters.

Trace fossils: late Miocene bird tracks from Lake Mead, and Matt Ferlicchi and Aubrey Bonde wrapping trackway slabs for transport at Death Valley. Most Park Service trackway sites are monitored for change, vandalism and theft. NPS photos by A. Bonde.

Catching up

For 30 years, fossils lacked the federal protection archeological sites had. Santucci, a paleontologist and law enforcement ranger for 40 years, remembers watching rangers unable to do much about fossil theft in 1985. The Paleontological Resources Preservation Act of 2009 finally required agencies to manage fossils scientifically — planning inventories and monitoring, and penalizing theft and vandalism. But it is an unfunded mandate, and the long gap left the field with fewer advocates.

Cost-effective ideas like shared network paleontologists may be the program's future. Bonde's four years will make the case for keeping the post and offer a model for other networks, while freeing program staff to help other parks. "I may inadvertently be opening up many cans of worms," she says — and she is "honored" to be trusted with the role.

Sources

Based on Lauren Parry-Joseph (park ranger, Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument), "A Long Time Coming: A Shared Paleontologist Comes to the Southern Network," Park Paleontology News, Fall 2024, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.