sample's museum I.D. number, declaring that the visitor is responsible for contributing it to the collection.
The Green River Formation is not limited to Fossil Butte National Monument, however, which is only 13 square miles in extent. Several local commercial operations work their own exposures of the rock outside the park. For a fee, visitors can not only participate in the quarrying of fossils, but they actually get to keep what they find. Of these commercial quarrying operations, the closest to the park is Ulrich's Fossil Gallery, located just off the park entrance road near Highway 30. Ulrich's program lasts about three hours, and allows the visitor to keep up to 10 fossil fish for a fee of $75. (The state of Wyoming retains any "rare and unusual" fossils: stingrays, gar fish, mammals, birds.) The commercial fossil quarries typically will square off your fossil finds with their rock saws, making them more stable and attractive for display.
Freshwater stingrays are known from Wyoming's Green River Formation, though today this group of fish is only found in South America.
If you don't have enough time to participate in a quarrying expedition,
Ulrich's and other Kemmerer-area rock shops have displays of their fossils
that rival the official display at Fossil Butte. It's worth stopping at
least one shop to check out the variety of petrified critters.
And the area does offer more than just fossils, in case you're caught in the unenviable position of traveling with a nonpaleontologist: The original J.C. Penney store is in Kemmerer, and the local Oyster Ridge Bluegrass Festival entertains music lovers for three days in late July.
I found myself wishing for more time at Fossil Butte. On the return leg of my roadtrip, my schedule was focused on getting back to the comforts of home, but Fossil Butte has a special magnetism to it. Having stopped there and sampled the wealth of fossils, I found myself craving more. Were I to do it over again, I would schedule several days in the Kemmerer area. This is not merely the acquisitive urge to own fossils, but a real interest the act of discovery the thrill that comes from cracking open a rock and seeing something no human has ever seen before.
roadtrip (Part 1): Driving to "West Dakota," Geotimes,
Travels in Geology, July 2006