Florissant - Fossil Ecosystems of North America: A Guide to the Sites and their Extraordinary Biotas - page 196

income from developing their sites, with
roads and lodges.
Meanwhile, many were discussing the
possibilities of turning the area over to the
National Park Service in order to preserve
the fossil heritage. Some concession
owners allowed collecting on their sites
while others suffered theft of fossil wood.
One famous visitor, Walt Disney,
purchased an entire stump which he
shipped off to Disneyland, California.
National Monument status took a long
time coming to Florissant, and it was in
1969 that 6000 acres of land were finally
secured for protection. However, fossil
sites are not quite the same as natural
scenic attractions; they only exist because
of excavation and collecting, and their
scientific worth relies on this. So, the
National Park Service manages scientific
fossil digs so that the site will continue
to yield important information about
terrestrial life in the Rocky Mountain
region from Eocene-Oligocene times.
A single locality, the Florissant Fossil
Quarry, is still in private hands, where
visitors can collect plants and insects and
those of especial interest are donated to
museums.
Paleontologists took an interest in the
site from its early days; in particular, the
father of American paleoentomology,
Samuel Scudder, was astonished by the
wealth of fossil insects found there.
Scudder wrote many papers on fossil
insects, but his monumental Tertiary
Insects of North America (Scudder, 1890)
is a classic. In all, Scudder described some
600 species of fossil insects from
Florissant, most of which are now in the
care of the Museum of Comparative
Zoology, Harvard University. While
Scudder was busy writing about the fossil
insects of Florissant, Leo Lesquereux was
describing the fossil plants. He named
more than 100 new species, and most of
his collection is housed in the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington
DC. The most prolific worker on the
Florissant fossil beds, however, was TDA
Cockerell, professor at the University of

Colorado. In the early part of the
twentieth century, he organized a series of
collecting expeditions in collaboration
between the University of Colorado, the
American Museum of Natural History,
Yale University, and the British Museum
(Natural History) London. Cockerell
frequently gave one half of a fossil (the
part) to one museum and the other (the
counterpart) to another. This practice was
common in the past but is frowned upon
today because important fossils need to be
studied together and it makes life difficult
for later workers who have to visit two,
widely separated, institutions to study
both halves of the same fossil! Cockerell
published about 140 papers on Florissant
material between 1906 and 1941,
including both insects and plants.
An important work on the fossil flora
of Florissant was Fossil Plants of the
Florissant Beds, Colorado by MacGinitie
(1953). MacGinitie met Cockerell at the
University of Colorado, and encouraged
him to restudy the fossil plants described
by Lesquereux. Like Cockerell, he also
engaged in important excavations.
Material from his 1930s digs went to the
University of California Museum of
Paleontology in Berkeley. MacGinitie's
revision resulted in many of Lesquereux's
names disappearing as he synonymized
numerous names given to the same
fossil. Many other scientists have made
important contributions to the Florissant
literature. Manchester (2001) gave an
update on MacGinitie's (1953) floral
monograph and, in the same volume,
Wheeler (2001) described the fossil wood.
The famous dinosaur worker, ED Cope
(see Chapter 9), described fossil fish
from Florissant (Cope, 1875, 1878);
CT Brues (1906, 1908, 1910) studied the
fossil bees and wasps, and F M Carpenter
(1930) worked on the fossil ants. Frank
Carpenter of Harvard University was
also the editor of the two-volume
compilation of fossil insects for
the Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology
(Carpenter, 1992). He was the most
influentual paleoentomologist in the