Visitors to Agate Fossil Beds National Monument often ask if the bones in the diorama are real. They are reproductions but now an original "slab" taken from the Agate Fossil Hills is at home in the main room of the Visitor Center/Museum.
The slab was stored at the Agate Springs Ranch until 1969. At that time a crew of National Park staff including Roy Weaver, Park Ranger at Agate and Ted White, Paleontologist at Dinosaur National Monument moved the slab to the trailer/visitor center. They covered the slab with wet tissue paper to protect the fossils from the protective wrap, then applied the burlap and plaster field bandage. It was picked up with a forklift and driven onto a flatbed truck, then moved down three miles of gravel road to the trailer. As it was being unloaded onto the base of the three-sided display case it broke and had to be repaired. A portion of the field bandage was taken off and a mini-excavation revealed the fossils inside.
In 1993 the slab became a part of the temporary displays in the new Visitor Center/Museum and occupied the stage area where the diorama was installed in 1996. At this time the slab was moved to storage. The process of measuring and ordering was complete when on November 15 a new case finally arrived and another crew of Agate Fossil Beds National Monument staff gathered to assemble the case and move the several hundred pound slab into place.
Visitors can now look past the diorama of ancient mammals to the hills where they were found and down at an actual piece of the Great Bonebed. This is one of the last projects funded by the Friends of Agate, without this group there would not have been a Visitor Center/Museum at Agate Fossil Beds National Monument.
