Fossil Cycad: A Lost National Monument

In 1922, a patch of South Dakota’s Black Hills was designated a national monument to protect hundreds of fossilized cycadeoid plants, one of the world’s greatest concentrations. Contemporary documents suggest the area may have been stripped bare before the proclamation was even signed.

The 320-acre site in Fall River County held 120-million-year-old fossils that might reveal clues to the origin of flowering plants. Local ranchers had been unearthing and selling the petrified specimens, nicknamed “petrified pineapples”, before scientists took notice in the 1890s. Yale paleobotanist George Reber Wieland became the world’s leading expert after his first visit around 1898.

Wieland convinced the federal government to protect the site. In 1920 he acquired 160 acres of the fossil land under the Homestead Act, and two years later he offered to return the land to the federal government if a monument were established. President Warren G. Harding created Fossil Cycad National Monument on October 21, 1922, through Proclamation 1641, which warned “all unauthorized persons not to appropriate, injure, destroy, or remove any of the fossils.”

Protection came too late. Before designation, Wieland had already removed many visible specimens for his research at Yale. After the monument was created, erosion gradually exposed new fossil layers while visitors took specimens from the undeveloped site. The superintendent of nearby Wind Cave National Park had jurisdiction but delegated day-to-day surveillance to local ranchers.

When Yellowstone Superintendent Roger Toll visited in 1929, he reported that “all available specimens have been picked up, and there is nothing left that is of interest to visitors.” “It is a liability, not an asset, to the rest of the system,” he wrote in his report. In 1933, National Park Service employees went looking for a specimen for the Chicago World’s Fair display and came back empty-handed. “They came back and said they couldn’t find the site,” says Vince Santucci, a senior paleontologist with the National Park Service. “There were no resources left at the location.”

In 1935, Wieland and a crew of Civilian Conservation Corps workers excavated over a ton of fossil cycads, and National Park Service geologist Carroll Wegemann later accused him of removing that material to Yale. In 1938, Wind Cave superintendent E.D. Freeland told the South Dakota Argus-Leader that Wieland had had “carloads” of fossil cycads shipped to New Haven, both from the site and from the stash stored at Wind Cave.

Ranchers, visitors and even paleontologists lifted the fossils out of the ground and carted them away. Accounts differ on how complete the loss was: one says all the visible fossils were stolen or destroyed, another that little remained on the surface by 1956. At the National Park Service’s request, Congressman E.Y. Berry of South Dakota put forward a deauthorization bill in 1955. It became law on August 1, 1956, took effect on September 1, 1957, and the land went to the Bureau of Land Management.

In 1980, road crews improving US Highway 18 unearthed more fossil cycads. “The cycads were placed along the highway, temporarily, and wound up disappearing,” says Santucci. Most motorists would never notice the old monument’s boundary stakes still standing among the cow-dotted rangelands and rocky outcroppings. One of the two original hand-routed signs from the monument turned up in the Museum of Geology at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.