The Fossil Exhibit Trail is a short, fully accessible boardwalk with touchable replicas, Braille and waysides on the animals that once lived here, from false cats to the giant brontothere. It is the easiest walk on the road for families, and it marks the western end of the Castle Trail. Restrooms are at the lot, and summer Fossil Talks are given here. The area helped make the White River Badlands the birthplace of vertebrate paleontology in the American West: by the mid-1800s, 77 of the 84 species identified from the North American fossil record had come from these beds. Real fossils do weather out along park trails. Federal law protects every one, so visitors should leave them in place and report them to a ranger with a photo and location.
Bones on your left. The Fossil Exhibit Trail lot has restrooms and a quarter mile of fully accessible boardwalk. If I stop when the car does, tap play. The next restrooms on this road are at Bigfoot Pass. The first thing everybody asks is where the dinosaurs are. There aren't any. The rock from their time was laid down under a shallow sea, and dinosaurs don't swim. What swam here was a mosasaur, up to fifty feet long. Its scales were slightly smaller than a prairie rattlesnake's. Later came the titanothere, eight feet tall and sixteen long, with horns too thin at the base for ramming. Scientists now think they wrestled. In eighteen forty-six a Saint Louis doctor, Hiram Prout, wrote up a piece of jaw. A fur trapper had carried it out of these badlands. Prout took it for an ancestor of the horse. Wrong animal, right place. His paper caught the eye of scientists. That find led to the golden age of paleontology in North America. The fossils on this boardwalk are replicas, made for your hands, with Braille built in. The real ones are out in the ground. If you find one, leave it where it is, take a photo with something beside it for scale, and tell a ranger. One visitor might think one fossil won't matter. Now multiply that by a million visitors a year. Parked? Give it a minute before you head down the boardwalk, and Boone will begin on his own with about three minutes on Senator Norbeck.
Photo: NPS Photo / Serena Rosales, public domain · Public domain