Building Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park

Mike Voorhies (UNSM Paleontologist Emeritas) and other paleontologists, construction and general public give an overview of the Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park and the Rhino Barn taking shape, the process and excavation of the skeletons. 

Building the Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park Transcript:

NARRATOR: The park is beginning to take shape. Mike and his crew are excavating the most promising area, where a building affectionately called "The Rhino Barn" will be built to protect the exposed skeletons from the weather.

PALENTOLOGIST: This one will be the time then in the building.

MIKE VOORHIES: Right.

PALENTOLOGIST: The baby should have its head in the building.

MIKE VOORHIES: You think?

PALENTOLOGIST: Well, it's what it looks.

PALENTOLOGIST: This particular footing may represent a bit of a problem. We may have to dig underneath the skeleton to pour the cement into this spot.

MIKE VOORHIES: We intended to put the wall here of the building. Of course we didn't know what was underneath. So we dug this trench out, to find out, and hit this horse and a rhino, and another rhino, and a baby rhino.

Actually, this spot I'm standing right here is from another rhino that extends in here. There is just so many bones that had to shift the building over a little bit, to try to get these inside. Where the wall is now, looks like there won't be anything beyond that, or very little. So we got the, we got the building situated  over the best, the best possible fossils right now.

(CONSTRUCTION NOISE)

MIKE VOORHIES: Yeah, I think the one thing I like about it, it's going to look like a barn. It's, it will fit right into the landscape here. So, the rhinos will be tucked in for the winter.

(♪ MUSIC)

NARRATOR: Not all of Ashfall's fossils will be kept in the Rhino Barn. A few are needed as museum exhibits for the park's visitor center. And, they have to be reassembled from skeletons collected at Ashfall a decade earlier.

MIKE VOORHIES: Most people are familiar with going into a museum and seeing a full skeleton standing before them. Most people don't realize that most of those skeletons mounted in museums were probably not found as a single skeleton. Man of them would be painstakingly reconstructed from bones that originally were from many, many different animals of the same species, and they were found mixed together in a bone bed.

Now there's nothing illegitimate, or necessarily misleading about that approach. That's the way paleontologists have traditionally carried out their craft.

MIKE VOORHIES: Ever since I was a little kid, I wanted to get up and touch his teeth, here they are! Most skeletons, mounted skeletons that you see were not found complete. I had never seen a full skeleton of any of these species before. You almost have to use a hippo model to get a living animal that looks like these things.

MAN: This doesn't look right, if I hadn't known what these things looked like, I'd would say you gotten the wrong ribs.

MIKE VOORHIES: Right, right, we didn't collect them together. One of the very unusual things about Ashfall is that we do have absolutely complete creatures.

NARRATOR: The complete skeletons help Mike and museum artist, Mark Marcuson, begin work on a mural depicting the Ashfall tragedy for the park's visitor center.

MIKE VOORHIES: There was always certain amount of guess work into his body shape. So, when Mark Marcuson came down to our lab, and he was about to begin on his project of painting an Ashfall scene. We were able to haul out the skeletons and take detailed
measurements on them. I think we all know what, what a modern horse looks like, and what we would like to know is what these little bitty three toed horses looked like.

MARK MARCUSON: OK.

MIKE VOORHIES: Now this is a fascinating little horse, they ... back in 1857 they found one tooth. This is the original specimen of this little horse, Pseudhapparion. And, for many years that was all there was. Then Morris Skinner found some skulls and jaws, he was able to match up this tooth with some skulls, and now at Ashfall we got whole skeletons. We got a whole herd of skeletons of this little Pseudhapparion. So you'll be the very first artist that's ever attempted to show what Pseudhapparion looked like in the flesh.

(♪ MUSIC)

MIKE VOORHIES: Let's get an idea what the camel looks like here. Shaped a lot like the skull of a modern camel. You've got the first three vertebrae on the neck here, and these are very, very similar to llamas, modern South American llamas. So, in many respects I think for trying to figure out what they looked like when they were alive, a llama is a pretty good model.

MARK MARCUSON: OK.

MIKE VOORHIES: These are some of the most unusual things we find in the ash bed are birds. And, this is an almost complete crane.

MARK MARCUSON: This is the cartilage from the trachea, isn't it?

MIKE VOORHIES: Yeah, the actual cartilage is still there.

MARK MARCUSON: OK, and this is the?

MIKE VOORHIES: There's the neck curving, curving down under the body.

MARK MARCUSON: OK. These would be really similar to a crowned crane, right?

MIKE VOORHIES: Right. Yeah, yeah, these are apparently, the closest living relative is the crowned crane of Africa.

MARK MARCUSON: OK. You thinking a fossil reconstruction would have license to put, like, the crown on the crane?

MIKE VOORHIES: Why not put a crown on him! Even though the crown itself is not preserved here. Bone for bone these are so similar, that it would be very difficult for anybody to prove you wrong.

MARK: A little artist's license.

MIKE VOORHIES: Right, right, why not?

MARK MARCUSON: I can take some artistic license in terms of coloration of the animal or say, plumage.

MIKE VOORHIES: Are you going to have one catching a lizard? Because we found the one skeleton had a lizard inside.

MARK MARCUSON: Yeah, I haven't decided which one.

MIKE VOORHIES: Which one? Which guy gets the lizard?

MARK MARCUSON: Yeah.

MARK MARCUSON: You start first of all with the skeletal structure, and after you are able to draw that out, and put it together on a piece of paper, then you can go back in with information gleaned from the modern animals,their closet living relatives. With the five different horses that we have up at Ashfall, we decided to pick three for the mural. And, I had to decide, well, how are we going to make these horses look different from one another.

So on one of them, that looked a lot like a zebra in terms of its build, I chose to use a variation on a zebra theme for the stripes and the color of the coat. So the idea is to really see what you can come up with, but still to have it look realistic. But, in terms of the actual structure and the look of the animal, we think we can come pretty close to what they actually looked like.

(♪ MUSIC)

MIKE VOORHIES: So what I would like is to have a map like that, and then have Gail print out giant turtles, then and now.

MIKE VOORHIES: Let's see if we can get him over on his belly. OK, and . . . it looks good at the foot.

WOMAN: Oh, this looks great.

MIKE VOORHIES: OK, I'm going to have to adjust the front leg here so the sole of the foot is flat on the ground. Even, look, even the sole of the foot is totally covered with armored plates of bone. Just . . . it would be like walking around in chainmail. The fact
that you find them in the rocks in Nebraska, I think tells us that we had a frost-free climate when they were here.

WOMAN: So when did we last see these in Nebraska?

MIKE VOORHIES: The tortoises last until we get our first evidence of glaciation in northeast Nebraska, and then they're gone.

(♪ MUSIC)

MAN 1: Can we go through there?

MAN 2: We're going to find out, aren't we?

MAN 1: Nope.

MAN 2: No.

(♪ MUSIC)

MIKE VOORHIES: Everything we need to have a tourist attraction, right here.

(♪ MUSIC)

NARRATOR: Only days remain before the park's grand opening. The Rhino Barn has taken on thelook of a mass graveyard of ghoulish dimensions.

(♪ MUSIC)

Complete skeletons of rhinos and horses are intertwined.

(♪ MUSIC)

And off to one side are disembodied camel jaws, and scattered ribs. Some are almost surreal.

MIKE VOORHIES: Well in science you're not supposed to read into scientific specimens any human qualities. But, I must admit, I try to empathize with the animal. It's hard not to do that when you've got a whole skeleton. I think it helps me in my scientific study, to, to observe them just as closely as I would observe another human being, and look for those little signs, that, OK, this one is different from this one. This is not anthropomorphizing. I think it's just getting in touch with the realities of your science.

NARRATOR: Deciphering clues is a challenge. Strange-looking white deposits appear on almost every Ashfall skeleton.

MIKE VOORHIES: Oh, this is ugly. Very, very heavy Marie's disease right there. This animal probably had the lips pretty well swollen, just before it died. It's like a, an inflammation, the bone becomes inflamed, and the soft tissue around the bone balloons up.

Um, gosh, what would be a good example? Well, if you've ever sprained your ankle, the blood rushes to the area, and the thing swells up. I'm just trying to, just trying to imagine, what they look like when they were swollen up. I'm not sure I want to think about that.

(♪ MUSIC)

NARRATOR: More than a dozen complete animals have been uncovered from the dust. Most are rhinos, and the females outnumber the males seven to one. Within the herd are signs of life within death. This female died bearing the remains of an unborn baby.
The evidence: two partially formed bone fragments. And, there are other clues to rhinos' social behavior.

MIKE VOORHIES: We think that the rhinos probably lived in a big herd. There's a little head and a skeleton here of a baby rhino. Right next to it we think it's its mother. So they're almost touching noses. We think we can figure out that that one is the mother
of that one. So it's kind of sad to think that they all died together.

NARRATOR: Like other modern African animals, these rhinos formed harems. Only the telltale front teeth denote their sex. Males have the larger tusks. And while most of the rhinos have near perfect teeth, one of the males has a unusual tooth problem.

MIKE VOORHIES: This thing extended out into a point, because the lower tooth, which should have ground against it wasn't there. The lower tooth maybe never developed or perhaps was knocked out in a fight, who knows? Sometimes I wake up at night, thinking about what would have happened if the glaciers had come another five miles west of where they did. Probably this entire unique fossil bed would be gone. The glacial deposits in Nebraska cover about the eastern quarter of the state. Just a little more glacial ice, and this site would have been bulldozed away.

(♪ MUSIC)

NARRATOR: It's June 1991. Opening day has finally arrived.

(CARS DRIVING)

After nearly a decade of research, eager visitors are now allowed in to get their first glimpse of the Ashfall tragedy.

PARK VISITOR: Oh well, it looks like glitter.

LITTLE GIRL: It does.

PARK VISITOR: Scattered bubbles of lava can be carried far downwind.

MIKE VOORHIES: In a public setting like a park, potentially, we can reach thousands and thousands of people. If maybe five, or six kids can come out here, and can learn something at Ashfall park. They can learn that there are scientific discoveriesout there, that they themselves can make. Not everything has already been discovered.

LITTLE GIRL: How come they all died in one place?

PALENOTOLOGIST: Well, we think that they were coming here for water.

PARK VISITOR 1: These bones actually as they were?

MIKE VOORHIES: It's remarkable, they don't seem to be petrified at all.

PARK VISITOR 2: You almost never get this kind of evidence about how the animals lived, and how they died. It's just an amazing site.

NARRATOR: And puzzling too! Like this solitary bone atop a rhino's skull.

MIKE VOORHIES: When we see this, it's always on the part of the carcass that has the best meat, and we actually think that was, that was pulled out of there by a big meat eating animal. Now we're still looking for the skeleton of a animal that's big enough to tear the hind leg off of a rhino. We haven't found it yet, but we suspect that somewhere in the ash bed we're going to find either a big maybe, a bear dog, or a saber tooth cat.

PARK VISITOR: What's in that bottle?

PALENOTOLOGIST: You know what saran wrap is? It's sort of a liquefied form of that, and it's in a thinner, so it has the ability of actually penetrating inside the bone. And then as the acetate evaporates, acetone evaporates out of it. It leaves a film only about one molecule thick of this plastic. So I keep adding more, and more of that, introducing more, and more to the interior of the bone,and it gradually becomes harder, and harder, as layer, after layer of saran wrap in a sense gets laid down in there.

MIKE VOORHIES: To me, the fun of a park like this, is that we're going to leave them here in the ground, so everybody can come down and make up their own mind. So, in this case, we don't have to resort to any sort of trickery at all. I mean this is, we're going to leave them just exactly the way we found them, and, leave them here for future generations. You know, they might be smarter than we are, I hope they are, and they can they can come up with their own idea.

(♪ MUSIC & THUNDER)

MIKE VOORHIES: At times like this, for the last ten years when I see a dark cloud like that coming, I always think about that big cloud that came in ten million years ago. It's hard not to be really overwhelmed by the power of nature. If we don't have some appreciation for our natural heritage, some sense of wonder and awe at the world around us. We're reducing ourselves to the levels of unintelligent savages, I think. This is part of our culture, we've got something that is real, something here in Nebraska that we find only in Nebraska.

A prehistoric world that is far more interesting than anything Walt Disney, or Steven Spielberg has ever come up with. I'm convinced we haven't found the whole secret here. We're still waiting for our first elephant. We're still waiting for our first saber cat. And I think around the next bend, in the waterhole, we could get a whole new group of critters. So, that's what keeps us going.