John Day Fossil Beds

Hello Everyone from Mount Vernon, Oregon.

First, I want to congratulate Rick on getting the comments to work.  I've been wanting comments.  Rick, you came through!!!

If anybody else wants to comment, please do.  It makes the whole thing more fun. I think you just click on the "comments" button at the bottom then click "publish".

Today we visited the John Day Fossil Beds in Oregon.  This really isn't too much of a tourist attraction but it is informative and educational.  I'll try to give a little sketch of what this place is about.

First of all, it's a National Monument taken over by the National Park Service in 1975 for protection and preservation of the area for scientific research.  It is a "gold mine" for fossils dating back to the early age of mammals.  This does not include any dinosaur fossils as they were gone by the time these fossils were laid down.

During several millenia dating back 29 million years, volcanoes spewed lava and ash over this area killing the animal and plant life instantly and preserving them in a sort of lava rock time capsule.  Paleontologists can uncover the fossils of a layer and see what kinds of life coexisted at that time period.  There are also later layers from later eruptions that preserved different kinds of animal and plant life that coexisted in that later time period.  It also provides a record of the areas climate change and ecology.

In the visitor center, they have displays of fossils and their best descriptions of what they are.  There is also a research laboratory where they clean, record and preserve the fossils that they find and then share the information with scientists worldwide.  Digging and preserving the fossils is continuous and ongoing.

For more information you will just have to look it up.

After we left the visitor center - and Linda got her book stamped - we hiked a trail around the "blue basin". The volcano leavings there are blue as you can see from the pictures.  (It was an overcast day and I think the blue looks bluer than the pictures show.)  I don't know what the blue actually is but it is a layer corresponding to a certain millenia eruption.  There are other layers and colors that you can see in the pictures.  I'll just add that seeing the blue ground is strange.  Some of it looks like batter that boiled over and ran down the side of the mountain. They dig for fossils in the blue ground as well as other places.

Tomorrow morning we leave for Oregon's Crater Lake.