Nebraska’s world-class fossil collections, carefully extracted from clay, rock and ash, fill museums and dig sites to overflowing. Fossilized skeletons, skulls, shells and burrows found underground go back to when parts of Nebraska were underwater, under volcanic ash or under ice.

Archie and Friends

Morrill Hall, Lincoln

Curators at the University of Nebraska State Museum in Lincoln display only the best fossilized remains. Nebraska is so rich with fossils, there simply is not enough room in the museum to exhibit everything in the collection. For example, the fossilized remains of ancient elephants have been discovered in all but three of  Nebraska’s 93 counties.

Elephants that roamed Nebraska’s ancient savannah grasslands included four-tuskers, mastodons and stegomastodons. Mammoths thrived here until about 10,000 years ago. At 14 feet high and 25 feet long – the largest mammoth skeleton on display in the world – Nebraska’s “Archie” casts a massive shadow over the fossil world. The museum puts the beloved Nebraska icon center stage in Elephant Hall – inside the main entrance – right where the star of the ancient show should be.

Before Morrill Hall was erected on campus in 1927, Archie’s fossilized front legs and ribcage formed the arched entrance to the previous Nebraska State Museum.

Outside the musuem, a 15-foot-tall bronze statue of the massive mammoth stands with one of its front legs raised. Superstitious Husker football fans headed to neighboring Memorial Stadium games, and students preparing for finals, reach up to give the bronze behemoth high-fives for good luck.

Archie is short for Archidiskodon imperator maibeni, the name paleontologists gave this species of mammoth in 1936. They later reclassified it as Mammuthus columbi, the Columbian mammoth. For fans of Nebraska’s mammoth mascot, there’s no need for a new nickname.

 

Intact in Ash

Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park, Royal

Parts of northeast Nebraska were covered in a foot of ash after a super volcano in modern day Idaho blew its top 12 million years ago. Thirsty animals gathered at a waterhole were entombed in the deadly blanket that drifted in from 1,000 miles west. Their fossilized skeletons remain today at Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park near Royal.

Excavations are ongoing. The Hubbard Rhino Barn protects the dig site from Nebraska’s weather while visitors watch from the elevated boardwalk.

Digging has revealed fossils of the crowned crane, saber-toothed deer and three species of horses. Last to die were rhinos, one- and two-month-old calves expiring next to their mothers.

“The animals at Ashfall are fully intact and perfectly preserved,” said park superintendent Rick Otto. “These fossils give you a visual of what they looked like, and how they lived their lives.”

 

Sea Monsters

Hastings Museum, Hastings

Grand Island native Gary Staab remembers a visit to Hastings Museum sparking his career as an artist. Years after first staring in wonder at the museum’s Nebraska fossil collection, he now creates lifelike fiberglass models of giant creatures that swam Nebraska’s ancient sea 100 million years ago.

His works appear in museums such as the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., but also in Nebraska where his fascination with ancient life began.

Staab built three large sculptures for Hastings Museum: a 30-foot-long air-breathing marine reptile that ruled the sea but went extinct after an asteroid strike 65 million years ago, a 17-foot-long bony fish that ripped chunks of meat with its  dagger-like teeth, and a 10-foot-long sea turtle cast in resin. The shelled reptile is the size of a car.

“The fossils of Nebraska offer us the opportunity to view the world from a completely different perspective, a chance to peek through a window that opens onto a vista before the existence of humankind,” Staab said. “A landscape filled with animals unfamiliar on the Nebraska landscape today – rhinos, camels, alligators, mammoths and mastodons – just to name a few. I enjoy the process of interpreting these ancient animals through a fascinating blend of art and science.”

Visitors can stare up at the ancient creations from the museum’s first floor or look down on them from upstairs.

Fossils on the museum’s second floor include prehistoric bison skulls and bones from land-dwelling giant sloths. Dioramas showing taxidermy mounts of more than 150 species of modern North American animals inspire today’s field trip students. The collection of preserved critters dates to the 1930s. Old, but not yet turned to stone.

 

Jellyfish Wall Art

Happy Jack Peak and Chalk Mine, Scotia

Just four rocky steps down into a hillside mine southwest of Scotia is all the distance needed to enter remnants of Nebraska’s ancient sea. Here, along the banks of the North Loup River in Central Nebraska, the impression of an ancient jellyfish is visible in the mine wall.

The early settlers of Scotia mined this “chalk.” The material formed when microscopic plants and animals were fossilized after they died and fell into the seabed. These chalk blocks were used in local buildings. When a home built from the chalk was demolished in 2019, workers found impressions of ancient ferns in the blocks.

Tour guide Jesslyn Weiner leads guests 3,000 feet into the mine. Along the way, visitors see small brown bats roosting from the stony ceiling – and in the walls – where giant earthworms burrowed long ago.

 

Kick in the Teeth

Fort Kearney Museum, Kearney

The Johnson family of Kearney extracted lake gravel for decades for use in paving Buffalo County roads. Mammoth teeth sucked from the murky depths of their sand pits chewed up the mining equipment. Because each animal produced 6-7 sets of 9-to-12-inch-wide molars during its lifetime, mammoth teeth are one of the most common fossils found in Nebraska.

One too many pipe repairs persuaded the family to quit the gravel business in 1969. Since then, they’ve been displaying the things they found locally and around the world in their Fort Kearney Museum.

Among 10,000 exotic items here are a set of Samurai armor and an Alaskan redwood totem pole. Egyptian mummies are preserved in a climate-controlled chamber.

Third-generation museum owner Marlo Johnson invites guests to touch the 15-pound mammoth tusk found on the family land. Guests take guided voyages aboard the glass-bottomed boat, Jennifer, named for Marlo’s wife. Riders look down for a view of catfish, bluegill and a lakebed of mammoth teeth.

Oh, how the mighty fall

 

Trailside Museum of Natural

History, Fort Robinson State Park

Two bull mammoths, weighing 10 tons apiece, battled 10,000 years ago on what is now a Crawford-area ranch. Ancient dust filled the air as the animals – nearly the last of their kind – fought for dominance on the high plains toward the end of the most recent ice age.

One animal having a broken right tusk, and the other having a broken left, allowed the combatants to clash in close during the eye-to-eye confrontation. After hours, possibly even days, one weary combatant fell to the ground, dragging the other with it, neither being able to dislodge its deadly weaponry.  

The fossilized remains of the prehistoric pair were discovered in 1962. The stony specimen spent four decades in the hands of University of Nebraska researchers in Lincoln before returning to the Pine Ridge for display.

Forever entangled in their duel to the death, the Clash of the Mammoths exhibit has been the centerpiece of the University of Nebraska’s Trailside Museum since 2006. The fossil was found only 13 miles away from the musuem west of Crawford at Fort Robinson State Park.

The facility features a mural of the mammoths’ fateful fight. The work of art shows the rest of the mammoth herd watching the battle, adding color to what life and death in Nebraska might have looked like long ago. In all, 18 painted works at the attraction illustrate creatures and scenes from Nebraska’s distant past.

Other displays include rocks and minerals, and visitors can make their own “pseudo fossils” to learn how natural forces preserve remnants of the past.

The museum also is home to the last bison ever killed by William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, a much more recent and one-sided battle to the death.

 

Unsolved Mystery

Hudson-Meng Education and Research Center, Crawford

What killed 600 bison near Nebraska’s “Little Badlands” is still debated at Hudson-Meng Education and Research Center near Crawford.

One theory speculates that the bison were driven off a cliff by Paleoindian hunters 10,000 years ago. Maybe lightning or a flood felled the animals – an extinct species much larger than today’s bison. New evidence, based on stone tools found at the site, suggests that five separate cultures butchered bison here over a period of 600 years, after trapping or ambushing them at a marshy spring.

Modern day adventurers view the bonebed from inside the visitor center, after stepping across 10,000 years of history and the spring where the unfortunate bison met their end.

 

Mammal Menagerie

Agate Fossil Beds National Monument, Harrison

Rancher James H. Cook didn’t hog the discovery when he found bones jutting from two northwestern Nebraska hills in the 1880s. He invited paleontologists to join him in exhuming the buried treasure from times past. Set aside as federal land in 1965, Cook’s Agate Springs Ranch became Agate Fossil Beds National Monument. Two trails lead visitors to the sites of Cook’s findings, with many of the fossils left in the ground where they were found.

The 1-mile Daemonelix (devil’s corkscrew) Trail leads to burrows formed by extinct land-dwelling beavers. The 2.7-mile Fossil Hills Trail takes travelers to quarries where paleontologists found fossils of yesteryear mammals, a 20-million-year-old menagerie including the dinohyus or “terrible pig.”