In 1933, a group of employees from the U.S. National Park Service found themselves in a bit of a pickle. The NPS was working hard to put together a display for the upcoming Chicago World’s Fair, a massive exhibition that promised to draw tens of millions of visitors.
They already had a scale model of the Grand Canyon, wood samples from Petrified Forest, and a 12-foot-tall “miniature Mt. Rainer” that experienced a blizzard whenever visitors pushed a button.But the director wanted to make sure they had something else—a fossilized cycad plant from the end of the Cretaceous period. Thousands had been preserved in the silt beds of South Dakota, and the best specimens were both familiar-looking and clearly ancient. If you were showing off the country’s wonders, a cycad was a good thing to include.
The staffers figured they knew where to find one: at Fossil Cycad National Monument, a 320-acre patch of land in South Dakota’s Black Hills, just south of Minnekahta. After all, it had been set aside for protection because it was littered with the things. But when they returned, they were empty-handed: not only did they fail to bring back a suitable specimen, they couldn’t even suss out where to look for one. “They came back and said they couldn’t find the site,” says Vince Santucci. “There were no resources left at the location.”
Santucci, a senior paleontologist with the National Park Service, is used to digging up and piecing together lost creatures.
He’s spent the past few decades reconstructing a different kind of extinct thing: the lost saga of Fossil Cycad. One of only a few national monuments in U.S. history to be completely stripped of its status, the site—which started out as a trove of ancient treasures—eventually became the center of political skirmishes, dramatic staged excavations, everyday pilfering, and scientific self-sabotage. “An incredible story emerged,” says Santucci.The tale of Fossil Cycad really starts in the late Cretaceous, when a large clump of prehistoric plants in what would eventually become the Black Hills was buried by a landslide. Over the next 70 million years, the plants slowly solidified, as their organic matter was replaced with built-up molecules of silica and other minerals. In the 1890s, South Dakota ranchers began discovering the resulting fossils in great numbers, nicknaming them “petrified pineapples” and selling them as curios.
Soon, scientists from the University of Iowa, the Smithsonian, and other institutions came out to investigate, and to buy specimens. The fossils were preserved to a unique degree, enabling researchers to dissect and study them almost as they would a living plant. (As Santucci explains, they were also actually cycadeoids, which have different reproductive structures than cycads—but this distinction was not made until later.) By the end of the 19th century, the land around Minnekahta was recognized as a unique and significant paleontological site.
One of these scientists was a young man named George Reber Wieland. A paleontology student at Yale University, Wieland had spent the beginning of his career chasing down dead animals, gaining a certain amount of renown for his discovery of Archelon ischyros, a Cretaceous-era sea turtle that remains the largest known to man.
In 1898, the year after he dug up the turtle, Wieland went to the Black Hills and found something that interested him even more: a fossil cycad, with what he later described as “the most perfectly silicified prefoliate fronds of any yet obtained.” He changed his focus to paleobotany, and embarked on a mission to achieve “a complete elaboration” of the structures of various cycad types.
“He became the world’s leading expert on fossil cycads,” says Santucci, who describes Wieland as “sort of an eccentric, crazy professor.” He wrote two books on the subject, American Fossil Cycads and American Fossil Cycads, Volume 2, in which he wrote rapturously of the “superb beauty” of particular cycads while laying out their anatomy and natural history. He even decorated his backyard with some of his specimens, arranged alongside living plants.
All this time, Wieland was also working on a related side project: trying to protect the fossil-rich area in South Dakota from which so many of his beloved specimens came. There were layers upon layers of the so-called…
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