Excavations at Agate Springs
The first fossils were collected in volume in 1904 by Olaf Peterson of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. Excavations have continued, off and on, to the present. As early as 1892, Erwin Barbour’s student F. C. Kenyon had retrieved a few bones from the site but their significance was overlooked. Rancher James Cook first picked some up in the 1880s and may have first noticed such deposits, without particularly recognizing them, in the 1870s.
Other institutions soon joined Carnegie in extracting slabs of the great Menoceras bone-bed, and occasional Moropus and Dinohyus specimens. The University of Nebraska opened a new quarry in 1905. Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History and one of the greatest popularizers and exponents of evolutionary science, and his chief preparator Albert Thomson began work in 1907. F. B. Loomis of Amherst College discovered the nearby Stenomylus quarry the same year. Yale University’s R. S. Lull soon followed.
From 1911 to 1923 the American Museum became the main excavator at Agate, but increasingly their attention was drawn elsewhere, including the later Miocene Snake Creek Beds 20 miles to the south. There, for awhile, great excitement centered around a worn tooth thought to be from an early human ancestor until the tooth was proven to be from an ancient peccary.
Until 1981, only occasional excavations for bonebed slabs and Stenomylus marked the next 50 years. Then, Robert M. Hunt Jr. of the University of Nebraska reopened the main quarries and a little-known side area, and found evidence of an extensive carnivore den of the beardog Daphoenodon.
In some cases, individual fossil bones were removed one by one, a very slow and painstaking process but when possible large blocks of fossil-bearing sediments were removed and shipped to laboratories for cleaning and analysis. The tools, chemicals, and special conditions necessary to extract the best specimens and most complete information are available only in a laboratory such as the one which is shown on pages [40] and 41 at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1905. Slabs from Agate Fossil Beds were taken there so paleontologists could examine the evidence and figure out the past.
See pages [86]-87 for a listing of museums with specimens from Agate Fossil Beds.
Members of Peterson’s crew built a box around a slab in the Stenomylus quarry around 1908 in preparation for shipping to the Carnegie Museum.
With a team of horses, O. A. Peterson’s field crew moves dirt out of the Stenomylus quarry around 1908. The boxes in the foreground are resting on the quarry’s lower bone layer. Several specimens to the left have been strengthened with plaster for shipment to Pittsburgh.
Crates of prepared specimens had to be taken to Harrison, 37 kilometers (23 miles) north of Agate for the rail trip to the East. Note that the wagon is just a flat platform and that the driver is using the largest crate as a seat.
