Saved in Time: The Fight to Establish Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, Colorado

Introduction

xix Introduction  In the summer of 1969, the Federal District Court of Denver, Colorado, heard arguments in one of the nation’s first explicitly environmental cases, that of the Defenders of Florissant, Inc., versus real estate interests that were intent on turning land containing an extraordinary set of ancient fossils into a housing development. For the Florissant Defenders, the case rode a ground swell of public support from an unlikely coalition of people—including conservationists, scientists, outdoor enthusiasts, and local ranchers—whose voices were echoed and reechoed by the press. Hanging in the balance that summer was whether the courts would or could successfully protect for future generations the remarkable Florissant fossil beds, replete with unique plant and insect fossils delicately preserved over millions of years. Their disturbance would be a loss forever. Today, there is hardly a paleontologist in the world who has not heard of the fossil beds at Florissant. And because of the site’s ultimate preservation, many have been able to see these marvels firsthand, as have hundreds of thousands of visitors from all walks of life. The story of Florissant—the extraordinary richness of its deposits, what they tell us of life’s history, and how they were saved—is the subject of this book (figure 0.1). xx Introduction Miocene Pompeii In 1908 a University of Colorado scientist described the Florissant area as a “Miocene Pompeii.” Miocene refers to the geologic epoch once thought to include the age of the Florissant beds. Florissant is comparable to Pompeii because ash from volcanic eruptions had preserved the biological organisms of the Florissant region at a moment in time more than 30 million years ago, just as Mount Vesuvius’s eruption had frozen the ancient civilization of Italy’s Pompeii at a point in time almost 2,000 years ago. Just as a visit to Figure 0.1. The main area covered by the Florissant lake beds (the deposits actually extend 2.5 miles farther south). The lake beds rest on Pikes Peak Granite, which underlies the local area. The valley is thirty miles west of Colorado Springs on U.S. Highway 24. (Drafted by Stephanie Zaborac-Reed.) xxi Introduction Pompeii today gives people a glimpse of Roman culture as it was centuries ago, so a Florissant visit enables everyone to see the array of life as it existed there at a moment in time some 34 million years ago. Theimpendingdestructionofsuchatreasure—atreasurethathadremained unharmed for millions of years—for the sake of a land developer’s profits and a few new houses moved Victor Yannacone, the talented and colorful legal defender of Florissant. He declared in court that summer of 1969 that to allow the building of summer homes on fossils like these is like using the Dead Sea Scrolls to wrap fish.1 Long before the landmark struggles of the 1960s to save Florissant that this book recounts, the significance of the Florissant area was recognized. The first Americans to revere this place were probably people of the Ute tribe, who had lived and hunted in the region for many generations. But it was not until the 1870s that scientists of the federal government’s Hayden Survey described the geology of Florissant’s rich beds and sent samples of beautifully preserved fossils back east. There, paleontologists Leo Lesquereux and Samuel Scudder developed a series of reports on the fossils that inspired a succession of paleontologists —a “Who’s Who” of science—to journey to Florissant in the ensuing decades. Their work paid homage to the valley’s plants and animals of stone. The time period spanned by the Florissant fossil beds—36 to 34 million years ago—falls not within the younger Miocene epoch as once thought, but in the Eocene epoch, which lasted from 56 million to 34 million years ago. During most of the Eocene, the climate of the Northern Hemisphere was typically tropical and amazingly warm from low latitudes to high. Following the end of the Eocene, the climate began to cool and vegetation started to change. Much of Florissant’s significance comes from what it tells us about this period of change. Some of the plants that grew at Florissant then were similar to those found far to the south today in places such as Mexico, and even as far away as East Asia.2 Landscapes Then and Now Whatwastheworldlike34millionyearsago?AremarkableaspectofFlorissant is what we can learn from what survives there. Enter...