Fossil Cycad National Monument, 1922–1957: The Park That Lost Its Fossils

Commemorative artwork for the centennial: the small dinosaur Hypsilophodon wielandi among Cretaceous cycads. NPS image.

Most National Park System units are parks, monuments, historic sites and the like. A handful are abolished: taken out of the system. One is Fossil Cycad National Monument in South Dakota, proclaimed on October 21, 1922.

A world-class fossil bed

West of Hot Springs, in the southern Black Hills, lay one of Earth's greatest concentrations of fossil cycadeoids — Cretaceous plants whose trunks look like giant pineapples. When the monument was proclaimed they were thought to be true cycads, hence its name; they are now known to be a distinct group.

Cycadeoida pulcherrima, one of nineteen cycadeoid species named from fossils found in and around the future monument. From Darton and Smith, U.S. Geological Survey Edgemont folio, 1904.

Smithsonian, Yale and other paleobotanists collected here, and the finds yielded nineteen new species. Yale's George Wieland made the site his life's work and campaigned for its protection. Its scientific value, and the excitement over the new Dinosaur National Monument, led President Warren G. Harding to proclaim it under the Antiquities Act of 1906.

The monument's boundary in Fall River County. NPS image.

Geology of Fossil Cycad National Monument, from USGS mapping of 1957. NPS image.

A monument without a keeper

George Wieland supervising an excavation at the monument. NPS.

For about thirty-five years the monument had no funding, facilities or staff — the Great Depression saw to that — and was managed from Wind Cave National Park. Wieland himself was part of the problem: he pressed for protection, even bought the land, yet also collected tons of fossils. Collecting stripped the surface of its namesake cycadeoids.

• 1930s: boundary survey markers are set.
• 1935: the Park Service, Wieland and a small Civilian Conservation Corps team dig a test excavation and find cycadeoids below the surface — but World War II turns attention elsewhere.
• A visitor center Wieland commissioned, with fossils displayed in place like the quarry wall at Dinosaur, is never built.

Plans for the visitor center that was never built. NPS image.

A 1930s boundary marker, now in NPS collections. NPS photo.

One of the few surviving objects from the monument, found in the collections of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology and returned to the Park Service. NPS photo.

Abolished

By the 1950s the monument's champions had died, the Park Service saw little point in a monument without its fossils, and the postwar hunt for uranium made the land attractive for mining claims. On September 1, 1957, Congress took the rare step of abolishing it and handed the land to the Bureau of Land Management.

The lesson

Fossils are non-renewable, and sites are easily damaged by careless visits and overcollecting. At fossil sites, stay on durable surfaces, leave what you find, and report vandalism to a ranger or NPS Investigative Services.

The Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management and partners marked the centennial on National Fossil Day, October 12, 2022, at the Museum of Geology at the South Dakota School of Mines in Rapid City.

Sources

Based on Vincent L. Santucci, "Centennial Commemoration for the Creation of Fossil Cycad National Monument," Park Paleontology News, Fall 2022, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. For the full history, see Santucci and Ghist, "Fossil Cycad National Monument: A History From Discovery to Deauthorization" (2014). The source spells the dinosaur "Hysilophodon". A Leave No Trace logo is not reproduced.