State Parks and National Parks

Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historic Park

In the spring of 1971, heavy rains eroded a portion of Melvin Colson's cornfield. The farmer's bad luck proved to be a windfall for paleontologists: The exposed gully yielded the skull of a baby rhino, preserved for an estimated 10 million years in a bed of sparkling gray ash.

Since then, skeletons of hundreds of rhinos and other animals have been excavated by the University of Nebraska State Museum at the former cornfield, now the Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park.

The site is extremely significant because most of the specimens are intact, preserved as they fell when a Rocky Mountain volcano buried them.

Visitors to the remote 360-acre grasslands park view excavations in progress at a 2,000-square-foot "Rhino Barn," where paleontologists brush away ash from the skulls of the prehistoric rhinos. A visitor center has extensive displays and a working fossil-preparation laboratory.

Several short public-access trails allow a closer look at the local geology, including the Verdigre Overlook Trail, which surveys the valley below.

These state lands are the westernmost extent of tallgrass prairie, a rugged rangeland interspersed with creek-fed woods. Local fauna includes both mule and white-tailed deer, wild turkeys and prairie chickens.

The Grove Lake State Recreation Area, five miles south, offers camping.

Photo credits in order: Photo by Don Cunningham, courtesy of Nebraska Game and Parks Commission.