[Illustration: Next to the fence stands a windmill, which once provided water for excavation teams.]
[Illustration: The narrow Niobrara River winds through the surrounding tableland, carving out bluffs and exposing occasional fossils.]
In time the Cooks’ house became a repository for a substantial number of Indian artifacts and natural history specimens. On summer weekends and holidays tourists ventured out to the ranch to see the Cook Museum of Natural History. James Cook personally guided many through the collection, but usually the whole family participated, leading the curious through three rooms and a small hallway.
Harold Cook wanted Agate Springs Ranch to provide an enduring memorial to the ancient past. Soon after his death in 1962 his second wife, Margaret Crozier Cook, and friends began a campaign to add the fossil beds to the National Park System. Their efforts succeeded in 1965, when Congress authorized the establishment of Agate Fossil Beds National Monument.
Today you can walk about Carnegie and University Hills where the great digs took place. You can see a few exposed fossil specimens, and you can try to recreate in your mind the life and landscape of this part of Nebraska 20 million years ago. To help you do that, we have asked paleontologists James R. and Laurie J. Macdonald, in Part 2 of this handbook, to take you on a journey to the past and then examine the evidence.
Welcome to the worlds of past and present at Agate Fossil Beds National Monument.
_Text: James R. and Laurie J. Macdonald_ _Illustrations: Jay H. Matternes_
[Illustration: This mural depicts life in the Agate Fossil Beds area in the early Miocene Epoch, about 20 million years ago when the story on the following pages takes place. The painting is a composite of life at that time; if you had been there then, you would not have been able to see all of these forms of life together at any given moment! The original mural hangs in the fossil halls at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.]
1/Moropus 2/Promerycochoerus 3/Menoceras 4/Oxydactylus 5/Daphoenodon 6/Stenomylus 7/Dinohyus 8/Merychyus 9/Palaeocastor 10/Parahippus 11/Syndyoceras
Come enter into our imaginations and return to a day along the Niobrara River in western Nebraska 20 million years ago. Let’s go back and have an imaginary look. To set the mood, think about the wild animal movies made in modern Africa during the last 40 years. Think of a land swarming with life, of extensive grasslands dotted with trees through which great herds of grass- and leaf-eating animals are wandering. Look sharply into the shadows under the trees and amid the high grass where the meat-eaters are resting or stalking their prey. When you have this picture of wildlife in mind we’re ready for our journey into the past.