In the 1890s landowners in the Black Hills of South Dakota discovered the fossilized remains of a cretaceous period cycad forest.
An artist’s depiction of a cycadeoid forest in the Cretaceous period. Two people stand beside a cycad to illustrate the immense sizes these plants could have reached.
When Congress officially recognized the significance of South Dakota’s fossil forest, they intended to provide the land with permanent federal protection, ensuring its preservation for public use.
But after Congress designated the land a national monument in 1922, no funding was allocated to support the land. All the National Park Service could afford were a few signs saying, “Fossil Cycad National Monument, No Prospecting.” The warning wasn’t enough. Without enforcement or management, the site was soon stripped bare. Fossils were taken by the thousands, illegally lifted straight out of the ground for private and museum collections.
Because people suck and ruin everything.
With no fossils there was no longer any point in keeping the park as a national monument and in 1957 it was deauthorized.
Today, the only traces of South Dakota’s vanished fossil forest rest in a small number of museum collections, including the National Museum of Natural History
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A tragedy for the world of science and for everyone generally; and a stark reminder of how things can be destroyed so easily and thoughtlessly just for vanity (private collections) or commercial exploitation without need.
