My wife, Nicki, and spent a week driving through Nevada,
Utah, and Wyoming last fall. One of our
target destinations was the American Fossil Quarry outside of Kemmerer,
Wyoming, to dig for fossil fish from the Green River formation, a world-famous
lagerstatte—a region of extraordinary quantities of fossils of exceptional
quality. The fossils here come from the
Eocene epoch about 50 million years ago.
I had corresponded with Seth, the owner of the quarry, before
we left to work out the details of our visit.
He wasn’t there on the day we visited, but his assistant, Nick, was very
helpful in getting us started. I brought
a bag full of tools which, as Seth had warned, were mostly unnecessary. All you really need is a brick hammer and a
thin chisel, both of which the quarry provides.
Since this was the end of the season and their chisels had undoubtedly
seen hard use all summer, they had pretty blunt tips. I had brought my own set of thin spring-steel
chisels designed expressly for fossil extraction and was very happy I had them. Nicki used the chisel they supplied and was
quite successful.
It was a productive day, and we both bagged some nice finds. The floor of the quarry was covered with a
fine powder of shale, and by mid-afternoon the wind had picked up and was
blowing the powder around so much we decided to call it quits. Nick loaded our fossils onto a cart and took
me over to a line of diamond saws I could use to cut off the excess matrix and
trim the specimens down to a reasonable size.
As we had to fit all our finds into our car, this was very helpful. After a quick tutorial I was happily working
on my own trimming down all my specimens.
About 10 years ago we had visited the Warfield quarry across
the road. At that quarry we were right up
against the rock wall where we were on our own to pry the shale from the wall
(which was a bit of a chore even at my then-younger age). At American Fossil Quarry, they extract the
shale for you with a giant excavator and lay it out in rows of piles for you to
access. Probably a lot safer than being
right up against a crumbly rock wall.
You don’t get the chance to record exact location and orientation of the
fossils in-situ, but unless you are a professional paleontologist you won’t
care. As Nick said, this is a commercial
quarry, not a scientific expedition. The
fun is in finding the fossils, which we found plenty of, even in the space of
only a few hours.
The dirt road leading to the quarry is reasonable for a
family car right up to the descent at the quarry entrance. It’s then a bit of an adventure if you don’t
have 4WD (which we fortunately did), but at the bottom there were even large
travel trailers that had made it down safely.
If you like the idea of digging for fossils I highly encourage you to
stop in at this quarry.
