A Paleontological Resource Inventory of National Park Service Coastal Parks

By Hannah McCoy, School of Earth Sciences, The Ohio State University

In early 2025, I was accepted into the Paleontology in the Parks Fellowship Program. As a part of this program, I have been working in partnership with Nathaniel Valentine, The University of Nevada; Dr. Jill Leonard-Pingel, The Ohio State University; Dr. Aubrey Bonde, Dr. Vincent Santucci, and Justin Tweet, National Park Service; Dr. Christy Visaggi, Georgia State University; and Dr. Lisa Whitenack, Allegheny College. This project aims to produce a comprehensive report on the paleontological resources of the National Park Service’s coastal parks, including the processes that affect how we preserve and protect fossil material in these areas.

The National Park Service (NPS) oversees hundreds of national parks, monuments, and historical properties across millions of acres in the United States and its territories. Collectively, these parks contain an immense amount of fossiliferous material, ranging from the start of ancient life to the present. Throughout these protected lands, fossil material tells an incredible story of life, death, and evolution through geologic time. My collaboration aimed to tell part of that story by compiling information on the paleontological material in coastal parks.

We prepared a comprehensive document to share this information with NPS and the public and help safeguard these nonrenewable resources. There are at least 45 NPS parks with fossils in coastal settings, found along the East, Gulf, and West coasts of the United States, as well as the US territories in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean (Figure 1). My part of the collaboration was to compile paleontological data from these 45 parks. I researched the specific geological and paleontological materials and wrote a summary for each coastal park, to be combined into the complete document.

Figure 1. National Park Service coastal parks across the United States.

NPS

National Park Service Coastal Parks Map Key

Colonial National Historical Park

Throughout every park, an aspect of the ancient past can be discovered and brought into a modern context. Colonial National Historical Park in Virginia protects paleontological resources and historic sites. Among these important paleontological resources is Chesapecten jeffersonius (Figure 2), a scallop shell from the Pliocene-aged Yorktown Formation (Kenworthy and Santucci 2003a). Today, this evidence of early life connects with the present, because a specimen of this species likely collected from Yorktown was the first fossil illustrated from the Western Hemisphere, in 1687. This species is also now the state fossil of Virginia.

Even in early modern times, English settlers recognized the importance of the Yorktown Formation and its fossils by using the abundant shell beds to produce lime for building materials (Chriscoe et al. 2022). In the park, countless paleontological materials, including Chesapecten jeffersonius, are protected by the NPS, giving the public the opportunity to learn about their importance and history, both past and present.

Figure 2. Original illustration of Chesapecten jeffersonius, likely from the Yorktown Formation, in Colonial National Historical Park.

From Lister (1687); reproduced in Ward and Blackwelder (1975).

Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve

Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve in southwestern Alaska contains extremely significant coastal paleontological resources in the form of dinosaur tracks (Figure 3). The first known evidence of Cretaceous-aged dinosaurs was found near the coast here. The Late Cretaceous Chignik Formation of the park preserves approximately 75 dinosaur and bird track sites, of which 93 percent belong to hadrosaurs (Fiorillo et al. 2019). Thanks to the NPS, the park, a cold and wet coastal setting, preserves and protects evidence of a much warmer coastal tidal flat from approximately 70 million years ago.

Figure 3. Trace fossil of a hadrosaurian dinosaur track in Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve.

Photo by Tony Fiorello, reproduced in Kenworthy and Santucci (2003b)

Channel Islands National Park

Channel Islands National Park, off the coast of southern California, protects both fossilized and modern biodiversity, from middle-late Cenozoic macrofossils to modern kelp forests and marine invertebrates (Tweet et al. 2020). In this park, visitors can walk through geologic time and observe the evolution and extinction of organisms throughout multiple periods.

One of the most famous examples from the park are pygmy (smaller than average) mammoths (Figure 4). Pygmy mammoths evolved from full-sized mammoths that swam from mainland California to Santarosae, a landmass that included the four northern channel islands of the park. After mammoths arrived on the island, they evolved to a smaller size due to limited predators, space, and food (National Park Service 2020).

Pygmy mammoths inhabited the area that includes the park until about 10,000 years ago, when the Ice Age was coming to an end. Rising sea levels turned Santarosae into smaller islands, and humans started inhabiting them. The National Park Service’s preservation and protection of areas like Channel Islands National Park gives visitors and the public a way to see how species evolve and become extinct.

Figure 4. The Rockwell mammoth, a male pygmy mammoth fossil discovered on Santa Rosa Island in Channel Islands National Park. This fossil shows 90% of the animal’s skeleton.

NPS / Justin Tweet

Through the support of the National Park Service and the Paleontological Society, I was able to research paleontological resources in each coastal park, bringing attention to the uniqueness of each park and its resources and the need for preserving and protecting them for future generations to witness and study.

References

Chriscoe, M., R. Lockwood, J. S. Tweet, and V. L. Santucci. 2022. Colonial National Historical Park: Paleontological resource inventory (public version). Natural Resource Report NPS/COLO/NRR—2022/2361. National Park Service, Fort Collins, Colorado. https://doi.org/10.36967/nrr-2291851.

Fiorillo, A. R., Y. Kobayashi, P. J. McCarthy, T. Tanaka, R. S. Tykoski, Y. N. Lee, R. Takasaki, and J. Yoshida. 2019. Dinosaur ichnology and sedimentology of the Chignik Formation (Upper Cretaceous), Aniakchak National Monument, southwestern Alaska: Further insights on habitat preferences of high-latitude hadrosaurs. PLOS ONE 14(10): e0223471. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223471.

Kenworthy, J. P., and V. L. Santucci. 2003a. Paleontological resource inventory and monitoring: Northeast Coastal and Barrier Network. TIC# D-340. National Park Service, Denver, Colorado.

Kenworthy, J. P., and V. L. Santucci. 2003b. Paleontological Resource Inventory and Monitoring: Southwestern Alaska Network. National Park Service TIC# D-93.

Lister, M. 1687. Historiae sive Synopsis Methodiacae Chonchyliorum: quorum Omnium Picturae, ad vivum delineatae, exhibëtur Liber Primus, que est de Cochleis Terrestribus. London, England.

National Park Service, 2020. Channel Islands National Park, The Pygmy Mammoth, U.S. Department of the Interior, www.nps.gov/chis/learn/historyculture/pygmymammoth.htm.

Tweet, J. S., V. L. Santucci, K. Convery, J. Hoffman, and L. Kirn. 2020. Channel Islands National Park: Paleontological resource inventory (public version). Natural Resource Report NPS/CHIS/NRR—2020/2171. National Park Service, Fort Collins, Colorado. https://doi.org/10.36967/nrr-2278664.

Ward, L. W., and B. W. Blackwelder. 1975. Chesapecten, a new genus of Pectinidae (Mollusca: Bivalvia) from the Miocene and Pliocene of eastern North America. U.S. Geological Survey, Washington, D.C. Professional Paper 861. https://doi.org/10.3133/pp861.

Tags: aniakchak national monument & preserve, channel islands national park, colonial national historical park, fossils, paleontology, parkpaleonewsseries