Oregon center gives fossil tales new bite

By Dan Spatz
The Dalles Chronicle

DAN SPATZ / AP Scott Foss holds a cast of the skull a bison-sized pig-like mammal called an entelodont at the Thomas Condon Paleontology Center near Dayville, Ore. Foss manages the center's collection.

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DAYVILLE, Ore. — A different world lies quietly beneath the prairies and ponderosa of Eastern Oregon, and a new federal research center is helping bring its secrets to light.

The Thomas Condon Paleontology Center, which opened in December 2003, is both a world-class scientific research center and an information gateway to this unique region.

Pioneering Oregon geologist Thomas Condon, an Irish immigrant and minister of the Congregational Church in The Dalles, was the first person to recognize the fossil beds' significance.

Travelers along the old Dalles Military Road gathered leaf fossils and sent them to Condon in The Dalles, and he explored the region in 1865. Condon became Oregon's first state geologist in 1872; he later served as professor of geology at the University of Oregon.

Center honors 2 scientists

The new paleontology center — envisioned when the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument was established under the U.S. Park Service in 1975, but only recently funded — honors not only Condon's legacy but also a later paleontologist, John Campbell Merriam, who championed scientific research of the fossil beds in the early 20th century. The center is located near Dayville, in Grant County.

"If there's any place in the National Park Service that really deserves a facility of this sort, it's a place like this," said Ted Fremd, senior paleontologist. "This has just as deep a view into time as the Grand Canyon, but it's essentially invisible to the public."

Fremd and other monument staff hope to change that, using interpretive exhibits, classroom outreach, fossil-bed tours and a natural-history gallery that opens next year.

The area showcases 40 million years of unbroken geologic history, explains Dr. Scott Foss, who manages the center's extensive fossil collection. That, by itself, makes the site unique in North America.
 
Most fossil sites display only narrow slices of time, covering brief intervals scattered widely through the ages. The John Day record is far more extensive, covering a vast reach of mammalian evolution.

River unveils past

Thousands of fossil species have been revealed as the John Day River slowly cut down through overlying basalt and volcanic ash.

"We have a movie, not just a snapshot, going back to what times in North America used to be like," Foss said.

Efforts to build a paleontology center started 20 years ago, spearheaded by Fremd, whose long advocacy was finally rewarded when Congress appropriated $8.4 million to build the 11,000-square-foot paleontology center and renovate a historic farmhouse nearby.

Labs and classrooms

The new center has a research lab, secure fossil storage, classrooms, and public area for soon-to-be-installed interpretive exhibits. A natural-history gallery is being built inside the paleontology center, with murals and displays covering 40 million years of fossil history.

Eastern Oregon had a tropical climate at the start of that period; the ancestral Cascades were arising through a shallow ocean to the west, and an unlikely assortment of mammals wandered the landscape. One of those is Foss' specialty, the "entelodont" — sort of a cross between Porky Pig and the Incredible Hulk, affectionately nicknamed "Terminator Pig" by park rangers.

"Picture a razorback the size of a bison," says Foss, who quotes a description by fellow paleontologist and dinosaur specialist Dr. Robert Bakker: "The white meat that bites back."

Four-toed horses

There's also a nearly complete picture of equine evolution at John Day, with horse fossils going back to primitive four-toed varieties.

But fossil-bed mammals come in all shapes and sizes. Even more numerous — and in some ways offering a more accurate picture of climate change — is the plant record, which is also recorded in the rocks at John Day Fossil Beds.

"The plants can tell you different things from the mammal fossils," explains Regan Dunn, the center's paleobotanist.

Larger animals often migrate in search of favorable climates, she notes, but plants are stuck where they sprout, and their shape and size give important clues to average temperatures and rainfall.

Many early plant fossils here, for instance, are relatively large and have smooth rather than sawtooth margins, indicating a tropical or sub-tropical climate. Later species document a gradual drying and cooling trend that continues to the present day.

The vast sweep of pre-history here is only one factor that draws researchers from all over the world. The other key scientific asset is the ability to establish the age of John Day's fossils.

Rebuilding collection

One goal of the paleontology center is to build its fossil collection to represent more of the millions of fossils first uncovered here but soon dispersed among other collections.

To that end, center staff are making castings of fossils on loan from other institutions.

Yet while the fossil beds are well-known among scientists, their significance is still elusive for the general public — and that's where the new paleontology center comes in.

"If you do research and don't tell anybody else, it's not doing any good," suggests park ranger John Fiedor, the monument's chief of visitor services.

He leads tours each summer, and avidly describes the new research center.

"The purpose is to show off the fossils and show off the past."