How A Volcano Preserved A Colorado Forest For 34 Million Years

We walk the Florissant Fossil Beds and trace how volcanic mudflows turned a living redwood forest into a world-class fossil site. Along the way, we meet Eocene mammals, explore ancient climate, and reflect on the human choices that saved this place from development.

• planning trails around the visitor center and winter hours
• overview of Eocene mammals and insect fossils
• how lahars buried trees and silicified wood
• reading tree rings for ancient climate insight
• redwood cloning and why redwoods no longer grow here
• Lake Florissant’s brief life and rich fossil layers
• the Big Stump, souvenir damage, and saw marks
• Charlotte Hill’s butterfly and the scientist lineage
• preservation vs development and the 1969 park designation
• ongoing research to locate buried stumps and future discoveries


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Transcript

Arrival At Florissant Fossil Beds

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello there, this is Craig the Nitromedic. Today I'm headed back from Denver. I've been in Denver for the past four or five days doing some Denver things and driving past fluorescent fossil beds. National Monument. I wanted to check it out. Driven by it several times. Going to skiing and other things. Here I am. Gonna go check it out. We'll look on the screen here. There are several trails. The Petrified Forest Loop is right behind the visitor center here, which is behind the sign. Gonna go check that out along with the Ponderosa Loop. That's probably all I have time for today. But if you want to go check it out, see some cool fossils and other stuff, make sure you follow. Ironically enough, when I was in college for forestry back in the 90s, I was offered a seasonal job here. I did not go to it, I took a different seasonal job. The visitor center is right behind here. It's pretty new, sustainably designed. Got a lot to do here. You've got several miles of trails. Says 15 miles of trails, they're all self-guided for the most part. You have the Hornbeck Homestead, which was an early Colorado ranch, which you can go to, and there's seasonal programs available. I don't believe there's any camping at this park, but there's a lot of good history. There's fossils all over the place. You have fossils of this fly here, which we'll look at a little closer in a moment, which is a relative of the seed sea fly. You have impressions of plants right there, and you have big stumps, which we're gonna see on this little walk that we're gonna do. Let's take a look and see what we can find. This is the visitor center. It's unfortunately closed today. This is what they call winter hours. So they're open Wednesday through Sunday, I believe, to reduce staffing needs and things like that. We're gonna take a look at these depictions of these animals. No dinosaurs, these are not dinosaurs, but these are very large animals. Some of their remains have been found here in fossilized form. At the bottom here, you have at the bottom here you have a little horse-looking guy. And his name is Mesohippus, relative of the modern horse. Then to his left you have a slightly bigger guy, which is a relative of a deer, known as the Oradont. To me, it kind of looks like it has a pig face. And more like a dog or cat-like body. To me. And they actually are cloven mammals. They look kind of like they're actually related to pigs and deer. Then you have this big guy, known as the Brontothere, which is a relative of the modern day, tapir, horses, and rhinos. And that kind of looks like a combination of all those animals. Look how big they were. I guess that's an actual depiction of their actual size. They're not dinosaurs though, they're actually ancient mammals. They also have some fossils of sea flies. T T sea flies nowadays live in Africa. That's the only place they live. In the subtropical regions of Africa. They are blood-sucking flies, responsible for spreading a lot of disease. Back in the ancient times, when they lived here, in this part of what is now Colorado, they may have sucked on these mammals. Up here you can see the stumps there. The bronthoshir was a huge mammal, but not compared to these trees that we're gonna see a little bit later. Let's go take a look. Just to give you an idea of how big these things are, these stumps. I'm gonna film backwards so you can kind of see it in comparison to me. There's a stump behind me. Look how big that thing is. I'm standing approximately 20 to 25 feet in front of it. I mean, it is huge. Let's take a look a little closer. We'll talk about the Eocene epoch, which was about 34 million years ago, which was not the time of the dinosaurs. Dinosaurs were much, much earlier than that. Like hundreds of millions of years. Whereas the Eocene was about 34 million years ago. So this shelter has been constructed over the top of it to protect it from decaying further. The reason that they're preserved so well is because there was a volcanic eruption known as the Guffey Volcanic Center. There were huge volcanic mud flows known as Lahars that spread out in this entire valley, destroying all but the largest trees. The base of the tree in front of us was buried in place in 15 feet of volcanic debris. Trees died and unburied portions fell over and rotted. Special conditions because of you know a combination of mineral exchange. The wood became a silica-rich fossil. Pretty neat, huh? Oh, and if you like the video, give it a thumbs up. Let us know uh so we can get it to other people. Thanks. I know it's kind of a hot button topic right now to talk about climate change. But let's talk about look at this panel right here. This talks about ancient forest diversity. So 34 million years ago, this valley that we're in right now was quite a bit warmer, was more like San Francisco, which explains why San Francisco area has so much of redwoods. We've got Muir Woods and other places in that area where there's redwoods galore. And in a warmer climate, you know, redwoods could exist here. But since it's colder now, they don't exist. Climate change is something that's been going on on the earth for millions of years. The climate gets warm, the climate gets cold, and vice versa. And this is another angle of that huge stump that we just saw. Today you can get down to negative 35 degrees here that made it where these plants couldn't stay here anymore. This actually is an ancient clone tree. Redwood trees in modern times can clone themselves, meaning they can grow from the base of the parent tree, which is older. Like in the picture illustrated here. You have the older stump, you have these clones growing below ground or right at the ground level to continue the genetic line. If the main trunk gets damaged, the other ones can grow. This is unique to the fossil record, there's no other one like this that they know of. One thing interesting about the National Park Service's legacy is they try to preserve the native people. Here's all the different tribes on this sign that were involved with this particular site. I'm not gonna read them all out because it would take me forever, but interesting how we have come back full circle to trying to respect the values of the native people. The reason the valley is flat out here is because it was an ancient lake known as Lake Fluorescent, and it only existed for a few thousand years. You had many species of fish that were found here that were found in fossils along with other aquatic creatures such as insects and aquatic plants. Fluorescent definitely was a world-class fossil site. You can't probably see very well because of the sun shining right behind me. But Charlotte Hill, who was an early citizen scientist, found this butterfly fossil known as Prodirus Persiphony, which is one of the finest fossils ever discovered here. And she was followed by a bunch of other scientists. Over 150 scientists have visited here and done different research work, including Leo, Les Samuel Scudder, Theodore Cockrell, Henry Wickham, and Harry McGuinty. All these guys contributed. If you want to see exactly what they contributed, pause the video and you can maybe zoom in and read. Here's what's known as the big stump. It is huge. And you can see they tried to saw it up in the very top there. I'll see if I can zoom in. In the very top, kind of up here, there's rusty saw blades in there. They tried to saw it up to take it to the Chicago World's Fair 1893. When it was alive, they estimate it could be around 230 feet tall and about 500 to a thousand years old when it was buried by the Lahar, which was the volcanic mud flow that happened millions of years ago. Unfortunately, like a lot of the other spots here in the park, before this was a park, it was kind of a souvenir collecting place. People would come in and collect the petrified wood and chip away at it. So there's no telling how much petrified wood was lost before the park was established and they put a stop to that. Fascinating, the tree rings here are still visible, they're still formed and can be examined by modern scientists. We know these are redwoods because of the fossil cones and leaves that they left, as you can see in the picture here. It's very similar fossil to modern. But you look at this stump here, you can see there's rings, and then scientists can look at those rings and learn about them. Pretty awesome. 34 million-year-old tree that can still analyze for scientific research and learn things about Earth's older climate. You can certainly see behind me the big stump is way back there. Wish I had more time to spend at the park today, but I'm getting close to needing to get out of here and get back home so I can work on Thursday. Today is Tuesday, November the 18th. When I'm filming this, what a beautiful place. Definitely need to come out here and check this out if you've never been out here. I know we have the big stump we've already seen, but supposedly this is the world's largest. Depends on how you measure it. Usually foresters, including myself, measure things at dbh, which is diameter at breast height. Which means that if you're standing next to this tree when it was alive, you would have been measuring it at approximately your chest height to get its diameter. So depending on how you measure it, it could be the world's largest. Who knows? Decades before this was a park, it was actually competing tourist sites owned by different families. Supposedly there's a road out here. I don't really see the road exactly, but there was a road that divided up the properties right here. Pretty interesting from a historic perspective. When the park was established in 1969, there was a strong possibility that developers would take this property and turn it into homes and a golf course and private resort kind of thing. But luckily it still remains in public hands for everyone to enjoy and use. What do you think would have happened if that had happened? One idea to think about as we finish up the trail today, are there more stumps out here? And I think the answer to that is yes. There's a buried stump right here that the scientists are working on analyzing. They use lots of scientific equipment to find them. There's probably lots more out here to find. So definitely come visit. This was her property. The other one I mentioned earlier in the video was the hills. They've not been able to obtain information about where they lived, but there's evidence that they found that some places that she studied geology, which is one of her things she liked was interested in. But wow, what a what a cool place, y'all. Love to come back sometime when the weather is better. I have more time to explore this place some more. And definitely recommend that you do the same and come out here if you have an opportunity. It is at a high altitude in a Colorado mountain valley, so definitely think about what time of year it is before you come visit so you have accessibility to the site. If you liked it, give it a thumbs up. Think about subscribing to the channel. And if you have any questions or comments about this site, I just kind of scratched the surface of it. Let me know below. Until next time, we'll see you on the trail. Bye bye.