Can
You
Dig
It?

The desert songbird flits out from the shade, snatching up an insect and returning to its perch on the wing of the replica Quetzalcoatlus, one of the largest flying animals to ever live. I’m standing in the Big Bend Fossil Discovery Exhibit, an open pavilion that serves as a museum and memorial to the fossil treasures of the state’s largest national park—and a place where the past and future seem to touch.

That’s true across much of the state. Texas’ rocks span almost a billion years, from the first land ecosystems to the remains of animals that disappeared—in geological time—only yesterday. In between, oceans advanced and retreated, habitats and climates changed, and incredible animals roamed the state.

Fossil riches have long attracted collectors and paleontologists to Texas, and many of the state’s remarkable remains have ended up in out-of-state collections. But today, researchers from local institutions are working to uncover, and take ownership of, the state’s distant past. Some are launching expeditions to previously collected areas. Others are diving back into Texas collections to find neglected treasures.

That work occurs across many Texas landscapes, from the dramatic hillsides and deserts of Big Bend to the high rangeland and red rocks of North Texas to the live oak forests of the Hill Country. A wealth of fossils awaits visitors at museums in every corner of the state, showcasing the wide-ranging discoveries, new and old, that reveal what came before.

Whiteside Museum of Natural History

In the red dirt country of the Craddock Ranch outside Seymour, a small town 133 miles northwest of Fort Worth, bits of teeth and skulls litter the washes, and the bones of strange creatures erode from the hillsides. These rust-colored slopes represent the first great flowering of land vertebrates—and the Whiteside Museum of Natural History’s stomping grounds.

The museum is a handsome little building downtown that displays a remarkable array of early Permian fossils. Standouts include partially complete Dimetrodons; giant amphibians like Eryops; and ancient plants, fish, and insects from the Craddock Ranch.

I join museum director Christopher Flis and curatorial assistant (and college senior) Mc­Kinzi Donnell on an early morning visit to the museum’s private quarries. With the permission of the landowners, museum staff and volunteers have spent years digging into a set of crumbling hillsides. Now, one quarry contains a massive plaster-wrapped block of Dimetrodon skeletons waiting to be removed. Other spots have tarps covering half-excavated remains.

Millions of years ago, the quarry was a set of seasonally flooded oxbow lakes, Flis says. It was an era long before dinosaurs. Instead, the waters thronged with eel-like river sharks and boomerang-headed amphibians. Prowling the shorelines were early members of the synapsids, the family that would one day give rise to mammals. The most famous residents of Seymour, at least in the Permian era, were toothy, fin-backed predators called Dimetrodon, whose caliche-encrusted jaws, limbs, and spines pack the Whiteside Museum collections.

Get high enough up the bank, and the ancient mud gives way to more arid sediments, representing the death of the wetlands—and the ecosystem. “In the Permian, things are really starting to dry out,” Flis says as we chip away at sediment. “The hot seasons are getting hotter, and the rainy seasons are farther and fewer between, which is something that’s happening now.”

The heat and drought last summer were fierce enough to cut the museum’s field season short. But erosion waits for nobody. As soon as we settle in, Flis and Donnell begin work on a newly exposed Dimetrodon limb bone. I pick up treasures that have eroded out with the spring rains: folded skull fragments of the boomerang-headed amphibian Diplocaulus; a piece of spine from a river shark; and the teeth, vertebrae, and back struts of Dimetrodons.

Museum of Texas Tech University

The caprock landscapes just south of Lubbock are full of rust-red and blood-brown folds of sandstone, erupting like dragon spines from the hills. These deposits, the remnant of forests bordering the headwaters of a river larger than today’s Mississippi, are from the Triassic period. It was a time of recovery from the Permian mass extinction, says Sankar Chatterjee, professor emeritus at Texas Tech. It was also an incubator for many of the animal families alive today.

When Chatterjee arrived at Texas Tech in 1980, the nearby deposits caught his interest. He quickly struck an agreement to dig on private ranchlands around Post, a small town 41 miles southeast of Lubbock.

Big Bend Fossil Exhibit

There are places in Texas where the right hike can take you across millions of years. At Big Bend National Park, millennia of changing ecosystems sit in jumbled deposits, providing a snapshot of some of the Cretaceous period’s most spectacular and charismatic animals.

On a visit to the park last summer, I walk across desert flats with Sul Ross State University paleontologist Thomas Shiller, crossing through millions of years of different environments as the colors and consistency of the dirt and rocks change. Over several million years, Shiller says, landscapes of the Big Bend transformed from shallow seas to coastal marshes and deltas, grazed by duckbills and horned dinosaurs.

Barnum Brown, the flamboyant discoverer of the T. rex, arrived in 1940 with his colleague, Roland T. Bird, to prospect across the remote hills and draws. They loaded hundreds of pounds of fossil remains into a Ford delivery wagon that was forced to maneuver along treacherous roads. Among their finds was the nearly complete skull of Deinosuchus, Shiller says, a crocodilian almost 40 feet long that chomped delta turtles and dinosaurs with equal enthusiasm. A replica of its skull is on display at the Big Bend Fossil Discovery Exhibit eight minutes north of Panther Junction. The large open-air structure features beautifully illustrated murals, and display cases contain numerous real and cast fossils of species from the park. These range from turtles and ancient mammals to the enormous horned dinosaur Bravoceratops.

Waco Mammoth National Monument

The story of the Waco Mammoth National Monument begins unceremoniously. In 1978, two teenage boys from Waco discovered a chunk of something they took to be a bone while wandering on private property looking for arrowheads and fossils. Scientists at Baylor University quickly identified it as a piece of Columbian mammoth—the larger, likely sparsely furred southern relative of the more familiar woolly mammoth. For two decades beginning in the 1970s, scientists from Baylor and local volunteers dug into crumbling sediments searching for mammoth remains. Eventually they hit the mother lode: a tangle of individuals of varying sizes that likely represents the only known Columbian mammoth nursery herd.

“All of this excavation was done primarily on volunteer time,” says Brycen Turnbull, formerly the site’s lead ranger. As the finds mounted, Waco residents banded together to raise funds: first to establish a city park, then to finance the construction of a state-of-the-art dig shelter. Finally, citizens successfully lobbied to have the site declared a national monument in 2015.