Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument is a United States National Monument in Teller County, Colorado, that is noted for its fossils. It is located in a mountain valley just west of Pikes Peak and holds spectacular remnants of prehistoric life. The fossil beds take their name from the nearby town of Florissant, Colorado.
The fossils are contained in the Florissant Formation of Eocene age. Huge petrified redwoods and very detailed fossils of ancient insects and plants reveal a very different landscape in Paleogene Colorado. Almost 35 million years ago, enormous volcanic eruptions — now designated the Thirtynine Mile volcanic area — buried the then-lush valley and petrified the redwood trees that grew there. A lake formed in the valley, and the fine-grained sediments at its bottom became the final resting-place for thousands of insects and plants. These anoxic sediments compacted into layers of shale and preserved the delicate details of these organisms as fossils. Many of the Florissant Formation insect species were described by the entomologist Theodore Cockerell. The Florissant Fossil Beds were set aside as a part of the National Park System in 1969.
"When the mountains are overthrown and the seas uplifted, the universe at Florissant flings itself against a gnat and preserves it."
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- —Dr. Arthur C. Peale, Hayden Expedition geologist, 1873.
The visitor center features exhibits about the park's geology and fossils, as well as a video about the site.
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“The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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And interlaced with curious devices
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—Bartholomew Griffin (d. 1602)
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“The monument of death will outlast the memory of the dead. The Pyramids do not tell the tale which was confided to them; the living fact commemorates itself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)