Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument
National Monument, Established 1969 After A Campaign That Went To The Courts To Stop The Fossil Beds Being Subdivided For Housing. One Of The Richest Fossil Insect And Plant Deposits In The World, And The Site Of Some Of The Largest Petrified Stumps Anywhere. · Florissant, Colorado
Thirty-four million years ago a volcano east of here buried a mountain valley in ash and mud, drowned its redwood forest in standing stone and filled its lake with a fine volcanic silt that settled over everything that fell into the water. The result is one of the richest fossil beds in the world and, more to the point, one of the most delicate: the paper-thin shales preserve insects, spiders and flowers in detail fine enough to show the veins in a wing and the hairs on a leg, and more than seventeen hundred species have been described from them. Above ground stand the petrified redwood stumps, the largest more than thirty feet around. The monument exists because palaeontologists went to court in 1969 to stop the valley being bulldozed into housing lots, and won with days to spare. Above the shales stand the petrified redwood stumps, the largest more than thirty feet around, one of them with a broken saw blade still in it from a failed attempt to cut it up for souvenirs.
15807 Teller County 1, Florissant, Colorado, 80816, United States
Open daily year-round during daylight hours, with the visitor centre keeping daytime hours and reduced winter hours; closed on major winter holidays. The trails are open all year and are snow-covered in winter, when snowshoeing is the usual way round them. An entrance fee applies per person with interagency passes accepted, and the Hornbek Homestead is open for self-guided visits.
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