Suddenly we noticed the teeth – an entire row, large, grey and pointed.
During a multi-day hike in Badlands National Park, our girls were determined to seek out a fossil and kept stopping to look the bottom.
They searched for differences in texture, attempting to spot smooth bones, as we walked along one among the park's distinctive rock outcrops. Wind and rain erode the rocks of the Badlands at a rate of about an inch per 12 months, continually exposing fossils that were formed thousands and thousands of years ago.
By this point, my husband and I were getting just a little bored with consistently urging our youngsters, ages 7 and 10, to maintain going, so we weren't expecting much when the younger one, Emilia, called out that the 2 had found something off the trail. Her sister, Elise, had noticed a small, white fragment of bone near where they’d stopped for a water break. Emilia looked closer and realized that a much larger piece was stuck within the cracked, crumbly ground.
When we saw these teeth, we realized that they’d discovered the jaw and maybe even all the head of an ancient creature. The whole family was very excited and told the park rangers in regards to the discovery.
To report on the women' discovery, we participated within the park's Fossil Finder program in South Dakota, a citizen science project. The experience was a highlight of our stay within the otherworldly landscape of the Badlands, where we also stargazed, spotted bison and went on hikes just like the Notch Trail, with its ascent via a picket ladder.
We later learned that the women had discovered the fossilized jaw of an oreodont—a prehistoric creature that paleontologists say probably looked like a cross between a camel, a sheep, and a pig.
The park's Ben Reifel Visitor Center features an energetic paleontology lab, where we watched scientists and interns prepare fossils and learned in regards to the ancient mammals that lived here thousands and thousands of years ago.
The park is home to one among the world's richest fossil deposits, and the Fossil Exhibit Trail, just a brief drive from the middle, features replicas and exhibits about extinct creatures – including the ancestors of horses and rhinos.
The parkland was once a savannah of lush grasslands and herds of oreodonts, which paleontologists estimate were once as common as zebras are in Africa's Serengeti today. They roamed here during a period from the Eocene to the Miocene, spanning from 40 million to five million years ago.
In the laboratory, display cases are stuffed with objects found by visitors, and the park tries to stop poaching by encouraging visitors to depart fossils where they’re and to document and report them at the middle.
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When we arrived, a ranger told us about one of the dramatic discoveries that took place in 2010. A bit girl discovered a shiny white piece of fossil in the bottom near the visitor center and filled out a report. It turned out to be a rare, well-preserved fossil of a saber-toothed cat called Nimravida. A puncture mark within the fossilized skull suggests that the traditional creature was killed in a cat fight with one other Nimravida.
This story inspired our girls to make a discovery of their very own, and so they turned every hike right into a fossil expedition until they succeeded.
Although oreodonts are found rather more incessantly, a ranger helped them fill out a form to document the positioning, complete with an outline and GPS coordinates, so a paleontologist could investigate. She took a photograph of them – each smiling and proud – to hold within the lab and gave each of them a “Fossil Finder” patch.
Many of the park's marked trails are short, and we enjoyed several of them on relatively cool mornings – including the favored Notch, Window, Door and Cliff Shelf trails. We hiked a leg of the park's longest trail, the 10-mile Castle Trail, which takes us through the prairie at the sting of the Badlands formations. One afternoon we drove past the striking Pinnacles Overlook to Roberts Prairie Dog Town, where a big herd of bison grazed nearby.
We spent a complete of three nights within the park, in one among the tiny cabins at Cedar Pass Lodge. The easy lodge dates back to 1928, before the Badlands were declared a national monument (they became a national park in 1978).
From the back porch, we watched storms approach and lightning strike over the distant mesas almost every night. The rain accelerates the erosion of the park's rock formations, exposing fossils for future visitors to find.
On our last night, the storms held off. Just before sunset, we left the boardwalk and entered the unique portion of the Door Trail. The girls walked along the rocky bottom from trail marker to trail marker while the sun reached just the suitable angle, hitting the rock formations and making them glow.
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When you go
Badlands National Park
Where: Western South Dakota
Admission: $30/vehicle (nps.gov/badl).
Ben Reifel Visitor Center: 25216 Hwy. 240, Interior, SD
Cedar Pass Lodge: 20681 Hwy. 240, interior; cedarpasslodge.com.
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