The Importance of...the Butt

heading outdoors and exploring all the possibilities of the season.

Sand sticks to pretty much everything, so here's a hack for keeping it out of your

socks, sheets, and rugs when you come home from the beach.

Cornstarch.

Simply rub some cornstarch where the sand is sticking and it'll fall off with ease.

This works especially well between your fingers and toes.

For more fun ideas, easy how-tos, and inspiring stories, visit LLBean.com-slash-guide.

National park trips can be very complex to plan.

In addition to securing lodging in or near a park, finding the closest airport, and verifying

the driving route and reserving entry to a park if required, a fair amount of research

is needed to determine how to actually spend your time once in the park.

From visitor centers to geologic features to historic sites, travelers often want to

squeeze every last opportunity from a national park site.

Beyond the scenic drives, hiking trails, horseback riding and boating, ranger programs, visitor

center films and exhibits, and wildlife sightings, the nagging doubt remains.

Have I missed anything?

Set against the backdrop of rolling hills in western Wyoming, Fossil Butte National

Monument, like so many other parks, presents a variety of activities.

Let's set aside the scenic drive and hiking trails and focus on the main event, the fossils.

Signs tell you what kind of animals and plants appeared on Earth at different times.

Once on the deck of the visitor center, a concentrated history of Earth's living organisms,

large and small, is documented on the railing that surrounds the building and looks out

over what was once Fossil Lake.

Starting where the deck meets the parking lot sidewalk, 540 million years ago encompasses

the Phanazoic Eon, the Paleozoic Era, the Cambrian Period, with complex trace fossils

and single-cell protists.

From there, the story winds forward through the emergence of small shelly fossils, brachiopods,

clams, jawless fishes, segmented worms, and horseshoe crabs, all before we reach the 500

million years ago mark.

The journey takes the visitor through sea stars and sea urchins, mass extinctions, glaciation,

the emergence of the Appalachian Mountains, sharks, insects, conifers, and ferns.

Eventually, we reach amphibians, reptiles, nautilus, spiders, and beetles, all before

the Rocky Mountains even formed.

After that, we finally reach the time of the dinosaurs and turtles, before mammals appeared

flowering plants and butterflies, fast-forwarding through birds and ants and grasses, ultimately

leading to primates and deer and cats and dogs.

At about this time, the timeline shows events related to the park, the deepening of the

fossil basin, and the creation of Fossil Lake.

The timeline continues, but this is the crux of the matter at Fossil Butte National Monument.

It's not a museum where fossils are collected from other places, it's a unique setting

among fossil beds, a confluence of specific types of animals and environmental conditions

that is set in this exact time and place.

In the early Eocene Epoch, about 50 million years ago, a large freshwater lake covered

the area where the park is located.

A plethora of life populated the lake, its shores, and nearby surroundings.

Certain unique properties of this lake created the environment that led to the preservation

of so many fossilized animals.

A layer of low-oxygen saltwater formed pretty far down in the lake, creating an inhospitable

barrier that prevented the animals that lived in the lake, such as crocodiles, freshwater

fish, and turtles, from eating the dead animals that sank to the bottom, so that they remained

intact in this salty grave beneath the freshwater habitat that sustained life above.

Added to that, the lake bed, the very bottom of the lake, was covered in a microbial mat.

This mat contained photosynthesizing cyanobacteria, meaning that it needed exposure to light even

at that depth, so it would grow over any dead animals that sank atop it, to keep the carcasses

from blocking the light at the surface of the lake.

Over time, a very long period of time, the lake bed became a mass graveyard of much of

the life that the lake had sustained.

The low-oxygen saltwater layer and the microbial mat, combined with the chemical processes

that caused fossilization, yielded not simply a bone bed of scattered skeletal remains,

but fossils of wholly intact animals.

Due to the completeness of each fossil, the sheer number of fossils, and the biodiversity

represented in the lake, the Fossil Butte Collection provides one of the best understood

prehistoric ecosystems.

The visitor center is the crown jewel of Fossil Butte National Monument.

The presentation of fossils is astounding, rising in great displays behind glass cases.

But one of the most fascinating exhibits in the building can easily be missed.

How many times have you said to your kids, okay everybody, let's hit the bathroom before

we get back into the car, only to be met with stoic resistance, I don't have to go, public

bathrooms are icky, and so on.

Please do yourself a huge favor, go to the bathroom in Fossil Butte Visitor Center, because

otherwise you will have missed the fossil coprolites exhibit, contained within the restrooms.

What exactly are coprolites you might ask?

The word is derived from the Greek term copros lithos, which translates to dung stone, fossilized

feces, petrified poop, and the bathroom wall is full of displays of different types of

coprolites, sorted by shape, starting with what caliber is your coprolite, containing

a variety of bullet-shaped excrement of various sizes and colors, all embedded in small pieces

of rock.

The exhibit doesn't stop there, though.

Each of the categories has dozens of pieces of rock containing a single coprolite sample.

Skinny curved samples fall under the category of smiling scat, accompanied by the phrase

happy poops make happy fishes.

The splatters collection carries the advice to note the variety of soft stool consistencies.

Blobs consist of soft stool in larger masses, ropes may consist of a series of dots, and

lastly the sand variety, which is attributed to stingrays that may have ingested sand while

Quote, it's gritty going in, scratchy coming out.

All potty humor aside, what good is fossilized poop?

What is the point of collecting coprolite and studying it?

There's a good reason to study coprolite, it turns out, aside from the cool means of

getting restless kids interested in visiting the bathroom.

Normally when we think of fossils, we consider bone fossils.

Everyone wants to see the Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton in the museum.

At Fossil Butte, we're drawn to the skeletons of birds, bats, fish, crocodiles, and turtles.

We love seeing nearly complete skeletons and even the partial specimens.

They evoke mental images of real animals.

And almost by instinct, we compare the ancient specimens with what we see in nature today.

We can learn about their physical being and some of their behavior.

Bone fossils help us divide the ancient world into carnivores, herbivores, and omnivores.

But the study of coprolites helps us untangle clues about the ancient environments these

animals inhabited.

The earliest known coprolite dates back almost 500 million years.

It's not always possible to associate a coprolite with a specific animal.

The animal may not have died in the den where it lived.

Hence the bone fossils might not be co-located with the excrement fossils, which would provide

a better match.

And there may be a variety of coprolite found within a variety of bone fossils, and it's

not trivial to associate them exactly.

An indicator, bigger poop for bigger animals, for instance.

Consider deer, which are fairly large, yet their feces consist of tiny pellets, much

smaller than marbles.

Excrement is a bit less likely to fossilize than bone.

The conditions have to be just right.

Two-fold requirements are a mineralizing agent, like calcium phosphate, and lack of rapid

decomposition, so not washed away by rain, disturbed by other animals, and so on.

Certain environments provide better chances of feces fossilizing, such as caves and rocky

outcrops.

In general, areas that are less exposed to the elements, areas that are very dry or very

cold, produce better conditions for overcoming the rapid decomposition that is characteristic

of feces, with their abundant bacteria.

Part of what we learn from coprolite is about what animals ate, because the remains will

be fossilized in the coprolite.

Flesh matter, bone fragments, and fish scales comprise a good bit of it.

The coprolite also showcases the microbiome from which it came, and consequently evolutionary

changes in gut microbiomes in different animal classes.

But the most predominant finds are about the environment in which these animals lived.

Analysis of coprolite tells us things like predator-prey relationships, migration patterns,

abundance of different types of animals, and indirectly, the way the animal that produced

the coprolite was integrated into its ecosystem, and the succession of animals that ate other

animals, supplying clues about the hierarchy of the ancient food chain.

Coprolites provide evidence of the types of plant life available at a given time, and

have uncovered surprising finds that place plants we know today, like corn and pine trees,

as part of the ancient world.

It can give clues about weather and climate changes.

Coprolite is part of a broader type of fossils, called ichthnofossils, or trace fossils.

Trace fossils are a type of secondary evidence regarding animal activity.

In addition to feces, trace fossils include footprints, burrows, swimming traces, and

the sedimentary structures formed in rock that are caused by cyanobacterial growth.

Fossil Butte National Monument has a trace fossils display in the main museum of the

Visitor Center, aside from the coprolites in the bathroom.

Together, these trace fossils paint a picture of the ancient world inhabited by the fossilized

animals, and can lead to insights about mass die-offs or other catastrophic events long

Fossil Butte National Monument offers a fascinating journey into the past.

The Visitor Center has, in addition to the actual fossil displays, which contain many

original fossils in addition to some fossil casts, several films, and a virtual aquarium

known as Fossil Lake in a Box.

It displays ancient fish selected by visitors that once comprised Fossil Lake.

The park contains several miles of hiking trails, many of which are weather-dependent.

Some are maintained and others are not.

The only trail open year-round is the historic Quarry Trail, which may be very slippery in

the winter.

Care should be taken when hiking in Fossil Butte, as the park sits 6,000 to 8,000 feet

above sea level in the desert, so be mindful of sun exposure, dehydration, and thin air

at high altitudes.

You can combine other parks with Fossil Butte for a long weekend or a longer vacation.

National Park Service sites within a four-hour drive include Minidoka National Historic Site,

Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton National Park, and Dinosaur, Golden Spike, and Timpanagos

Cave National Monuments.

This episode of America's National Parks was written by Lauren Eisenberg Davis, and

I'm your host, Jason Epperson.

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If you're looking for photos and tips about visiting national parks, check out our America's

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And if you're interested in RV travel, we hope you'll also check out our RV Miles

podcast and YouTube channel.

Today's show was sponsored by L.L. Bean.

Follow the hashtag BeAnOutsider and visit LLBean.com to find great gear for exploring

the national parks.