The ancient valley at Florissant Fossil Beds. NPS photo
Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, in a basin of Colorado's Front Range, protects petrified redwood stumps and delicate impressions of ancient plants and insects. Its geology has been mapped since 1877; in 2022 and 2023, three interns redrew that map with modern equipment — covering the whole monument.
Saved from souvenir hunters
In the 1800s, early scientific surveys and pioneers explored Florissant's fossil-rich hills, and word of its wonders brought scientists and tourists alike. In the early 1900s, private tourist attractions and a Midland Railway station drew thousands of visitors — who helped themselves to chunks of petrified stumps and dug up the hills. After decades of advocacy, the monument was established on August 20, 1969.
Mapping Florissant, 1877 to 1992
| Year | Work |
|---|---|
| 1877 | Arthur Lakes and Samuel H. Scudder make the first descriptive study of the geology and the setting of ancient Lake Florissant; Lakes's watercolor map makes Florissant known for its fossil-bearing lake beds |
| 1894 | Whitman Cross covers the region in the Pikes Peak geological folio |
| 1978 | Reinhard Wobus and Rudy Epis map the Florissant 15-Minute Quadrangle (USGS Map I-1044) |
| 1982 | Ralph Root splits the Florissant Formation into informal subgroups, clarifying how its layers were laid down |
| 1992 | Dr. Emmett Evanoff and vertebrate paleontologists from the University of Colorado Boulder survey the area; Evanoff describes five informal units of the formation within the monument |
Evanoff's map greatly improved the picture of where Florissant's rocks lie, but three decades of advances in location technology meant its units and contacts — the boundaries between rock units — needed checking and updating.
The internship
In 2022, the monument and Southern Utah University's Intergovernmental Internship Cooperative set up a series of GIS geologic mapping internships, both to improve the map for the care of its fossils and to give early-career scientists hands-on experience, networking and mentorship.
Interns with Dr. Meyer at the monument's entrance. From left: Ashley Martinovich, Paityn Schlosser, Ashlynn Little, Dale Ligon and Herbert Meyer. NPS photo
Their mentor was park paleontologist Dr. Herbert Meyer, who guided 71 other interns over 29 years before retiring in 2023 — he put off his retirement that spring to see the second season through.
| Season | Who | What |
|---|---|---|
| From May 2022 | Adeline Rich, working alone | mapped the central part of the monument, improving the placement of contacts by about 500 feet (150 meters) |
| From May 2023 | Paityn Schlosser and Ashley Martinovich | picked up where Rich stopped and mapped the rest |
Adeline Rich's geologic map of central Florissant Fossil Beds, October 2022. Image from the National Park Service's page
Five months in the backcountry
NPS Intermountain Region geologist Tim Connors joined Schlosser and Martinovich to introduce them to the rock units, visiting outcrops few visitors see.
Paityn Schlosser (left), with a tablet, and Ashley Martinovich (right), with a GPS receiver, before a group of petrified stumps. NPS photo
Most mornings the pair were among the first employees on site. They drove to a pull-off or trailhead and hiked in with a GNSS receiver and mobile GIS software:
- Schlosser, the geologic mapper, identified the layers and contacts and decided where each contact belonged on the map.
- Martinovich, the GIS specialist, tracked their position by satellite and attached the right metadata to each point.
They hiked dozens of miles a week, meeting wildlife, roaming livestock and the remains of homesteads, including in a 280-acre western parcel added to the monument in 2019 that had never been mapped. Changeable weather and technical trouble put a September finish in doubt, but in five months they mapped all 6,272 acres.
A possible new unit
In the monument's south, Meyer showed them dark andesitic mounds eroding from the hillside, strewn with overturned shale beds and pumice fragments — mapped by Evanoff in 1992 as the upper pumice conglomerate and upper shale beds. Should the hills get a new unit, or should the old descriptions stretch to fit? In June, Evanoff himself joined the discussion of what a new unit would mean for Florissant's geologic history. The andesitic flows, breccias and inclusions were mapped under a tentative name: the "andesitic diamictite."
The andesitic diamictite, in the monument's far south. NPS photo
The result
The final geologic map of Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, 2023. NPS image
With support from the nonprofit Friends of the Florissant Fossil Beds, Schlosser and Martinovich presented a poster, "Unearthing Truths and Transforming Maps at Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument," at the Geological Society of America's 2023 conference in Pittsburgh.
The poster presented at GSA Connects 2023. NPS image
The authors credit the result to collaboration — Evanoff's foundation, Rich's first season, and the geologists before them.
Learn more
- Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument
- Florissant Fossil Beds Geodiversity Atlas
- The history of paleontology in the National Park Service
Sources
Based on Paityn Schlosser and Ashley Martinovich, "Fostering Paleontological Stewardship Through Geologic Mapping in Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument," Park Paleontology News, Spring 2024, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words.
In these publicationsPark Paleontology News - Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2024Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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