Exploring the Past
Story and photgraph by Danielle Gallo
M
A Park Interpretation O fficer talks to school children during the exhibit’s grand opening last January.
y dearest wish as a child was
to be a paleontologist. I imag-
ined myself trekking intrepid-
ly across some vast, silent badlands,
squinting against the sun, reading
obscure signs in dust and rocks. It
would be a language I could under-
stand, the geologic record, and it would
allow me to reach down into the earth
to pull out some ancient creature (with
a flourish, of course) to the awe of lay-
men everywhere. I could see myself
reconstructing the story of the earth by
pure reason, tempered with the adven-
ture of discovery.
I think the fascination we have with
the far-distant past has a lot to do with
24
Cenizo
the brevity of our lives. When we can
piece together a story of earth from mil-
lions of years ago, draw a map of the
continents with strange shorelines and
long-forgotten oceans, hold the
remains of a living thing whose entire
evolution came and went under unfa-
miliar constellations, our tiny lifespans
are vastly expanded. We may walk
here for less than a century, but our
minds can travel the seemingly infinite
track of time at will. It creates a sense of
immortality to hold an ammonite in
the desert, and to really understand
that this was once a vast inland sea
teeming with creatures utterly alien to
the world of today.
Fourth Quarter 2017
Needless to say, when my five-year
old came home from school last
January with the news that her school
would be taking a field trip to Big Bend
National Park for the opening of its
new fossil discovery exhibit, we were
both pretty excited.
Big Bend National Park boasts the
most complete and longest-ranging fos-
sil record of any National Park in the
country. The record spans more than
100 million years, from the early
Cretaceous Period in the Mesozoic
Era, 130 million years ago, to the
Holocene Period, some 100,000 years
ago. There are representatives of plants
and animals from every period in
between, from when Big Bend was a
pure marine ecosystem, to when it was
a coastal floodplain and Big Bend was
on the shore of a sea, to the era of the
inland floodplain, to when volcanic
activity created the highlands of our
desert mountains.
Until now, the Park has never had a
facility to interpret the staggering dis-
coveries made here to visitors in the
way those discoveries merit. Last year,
2016, was the 100th anniversary of the
National Park System, however. To
celebrate the centennial, a challenge
was set for the parks, to partner with
private organizations to work on signa-
ture projects. The government initia-