KIMBERLY, Ore. — Once it was a home on the range, where bear-dogs and saber-tooths preyed on five-toed horses and other critters that vanished millions of years ago from what today is eastern Oregon’s arid high desert.
The rhinoceros evolved here. There were oreodonts, ruminant pigs related to sheep and camels. Saber-toothed cats from the size of tigers down to small bobcats roamed the region.
“There is nothing like them today,” says Superintendent Jim Hammett at the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument.
“What happened to them? All we know for sure is that we had them, then we didn’t,” says Scott Foss, curator of the park’s new visitors center and preservation laboratory.
The fossil beds of this national monument contain a rare continuum of 50 million years of plant and animal history, compared to 2 million or 3 million years at better-known fossil beds.
“That’s a snapshot. Here, you get the whole movie,” Mr. Foss says.
The plants and animals found fossilized here were not unique, but they were fortuitously preserved by minerals in volcanic ash in a basin where the fossils were covered quickly and not washed away by erosion.
“For studying mammalian evolution, this is one of the best places, simply because they were all here,” Mr. Hammett says. “It is not far-fetched to say it is unique on Earth. It is one of the few national park areas that has a pure scientific mandate. The major part of our budget is spent on scientists.”
Perhaps most important, says Ted Fremd, the monument’s head paleontologist, the volcanic ash that layers the site can be dated by radioisotopes with great precision — “serving as something like page numbers in a book with a 45-million-year-long plot.”
Mr. Hammett says humans were in the area by about 10,000 years ago, not even a blip on the basin’s timeline. They probably were just passing through, he says.
“It’s difficult to grasp how brief a time humans have been on Earth,” Mr. Hammett says. “That’s our take-home message.”
Soldiers found the first fossils in the 1860s and told Thomas Condon, a Presbyterian minister and amateur scientist in the Dalles to the north on the Columbia River. He tipped off the Eastern scientists, who boxed tons of fossils and shipped them to Yale, Princeton, the Smithsonian Institution and elsewhere, where many remain.
Prime examples, or perfectly reproduced casts, remain at the museum at the Thomas Condon Paleontology Center in the park’s Sheep Rock Unit, which is finishing its newest wing.
In addition to fossil displays, visitors can watch through a large window as scientists and technicians work to preserve and restore fossils.
A more hands-on experience is available through the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry’s weeklong summer programs at Hancock Station, providing a broad area of scientific exploration aimed mostly at younger visitors.
The national monument is on 14,000 acres in three scattered units in a remote but scenic chunk of Eastern Oregon’s Grant and Wheeler counties.
Graduate students in paleontology come each summer to work the beds, but visitors are not allowed to keep — or even pick up — anything.
“We have a very hard line on collecting,” Mr. Hammett says.
Trails at the monument are generally easy and range from a few hundred yards to three miles long. Some are wheelchair-accessible. However, most fossils can’t be seen by the untrained eye.
“If you know what you are looking for, you will find [fossils], but there are no big bones sticking out of the [canyon] walls,” he says.
People who want to take a slice of prehistory home can go to the town of — what else? — Fossil, near the park’s Clarno Unit but outside the park itself. There, on a hillside behind the high school, amateurs can find mostly leaf fossils imprinted in shale.
There usually is a $3 charge, and volunteers are there weekdays with instructions, hints and, in limited numbers, small shovels and claw hammers on loan. They will help you identify what you find.
You’re better off taking your own tools; a putty knife or similar instrument would be handy. After you dig out the layers of soft shale, use the claw of the hammer to gently start separating the layers and pulling them apart, or use the putty knife to pry slowly to see what’s there.
A recent effort found good examples of metasequoia leaves that saw daylight for the first time in 25 million to 30 million years, and a number of other leaves. With a little patience, success at some level is a given.
It can be hard to envision today’s dry hills of sage and juniper as the Neotropical jungle thick with palms, banana trees and vines that they once were. Lava flows, the formation of the Cascade Range to the west, and other changes gradually changed the climate and the species that could live there.
Grant County today is cattle and farm country not given to frills, and the cowboys are real.
The region is a photographer’s heaven, especially in the Painted Hills Unit, where the colors of the hills and cliffs seem to change with the weather and the position of the sun. Early morning and late afternoon are best.
About 120,000 people visited the John Day monument last year. Most spend a day or two amid the quiet hills that once teemed with long-gone life forms.
If you think back on what happened here, the urge to hurry slides away. If the wind is down and the birds are quiet, you can almost hear dust.
And as you may be reminded more than once, time in the fossil beds is measured in the millions of years.
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For more information about the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, visit www.nps.gov/joda or call 541/987-2333. Admission is free.
The fossil beds area is a four- to five-hour drive from Portland. The nearest commercial air service is in Pendleton, Bend-Redmond in Oregon and Boise, Idaho.
The visitors center and the Thomas Condon Paleontology Center are at the Sheep Rock Unit in Kimberly, Ore., on Oregon Route 19, two miles north of the intersection with U.S. 26 and nine miles west of Dayville.
The Painted Hills Unit of the monument is nine miles northwest of Mitchell and 75 miles east of Bend. The Clarno Unit is 18 miles west of the town of Fossil.
Many sites within the monument have water, and there are some picnic facilities, but no food service. The sun can be deceptively strong. Wear a hat, bring a well-stocked cooler and watch for rattlesnakes.
The area has campgrounds and RV parks as well as standard lodging ranging from bed-and-breakfast facilities to a Best Western in the city of John Day. For a list, go to www.grantcounty.cc and click on Businesses, then L for lodging.
The Kam Wah Chung State Heritage Site and Museum (Canton Street, John Day) celebrates the thousands of Chinese immigrants who worked in the mines of the 1860s gold-rush era. The museum is open from May 1 through Oct. 31 — from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is free. For more information, visit www.oregonstateparks.org/park_8.php or call 541/575-2800.
There also are golf courses in the area, and the John Day River, which runs through the fossil beds, is good for fishing and rafting.
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