The visitor center is pretty small, and likely wouldn't take a visitor more than 20-30 minutes to read each exhibit and description. But it was indoors (climate controlled) and flush toilets and drinking water were on site, and provided good insight into how prehistory can be reconstructed.
None of this would be true of the national monument mentioned, above.
[I hiked a part of Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument a few years ago, but apparently didn't blog it. It consists of a boundary, and two trails, both of which are considered "temporary" trails, because they don't actually take you near any likely fossil finds. They only exist to count visits and provide visitors something to do in the area. There is also extremely limited on-site interpretation. It's basically left up to the visitor to download the information on their website as you walk around]
In my case, I walked around, first, then hit the visitor center, to sort of reiterate what I saw on site. But the signage on the trail was informative. I could see the spot where a large mastadon tusk was found in the 1960s, then reburied, then rediscovered in the 21st Century, and where a tiny Dire Wolf knuckle was found. [The knuckle was the only solid evidence that Dire Wolves once lived in southern Nevada. The mastadon tusk was found partially wrapped in a 1960s Las Vegas area newspaper.]
Of course, for me, not being bound by the rules of science, I can make up stories about time travellers buring mid-20th Century newspapers into the ground, thousands of years ago, and mobile, trading indigenous people taking bones from the La Brea Tar Pits and burying them in southern Nevada. [No, I'm not serious, but, yes, enjoying thinking up ascientific alternative explanations].
There are three designated trails in Ice Age Fossils State Park. The shortest is the Megafauna trail, a 3/10 of a mile paved trail around metal "sculptures" of dire wolves, North American lion, mastadon, and other large mammals that lived here during previous ice age periods. I didn't use a tape measure, mind you, but some sculptures did not seem proportional to how large they should be. Those old bison were huge!
The other two trails form overlapping loops around areas that were excavated in the early 1960s, and areas where "natural" erosion of the Las Vegas Wash exposed layers of deposits. Walking all sections of the three trails, and the connectors, totaled a little over 4.5 miles for the day. That's longer than it had to be because I needed to pee, so walked back to the visitor center after finishing the Big Dig trail, then headed back out to cover the parts of the Las Vegas Wash trail that I didn't cover on the way back, the first time.
The significance of this area (both the state park and the national monument) is that springs once rose here. Rains that falls on the Las Vegas Mountains travels underground, until it reaches an imperious layer, where it seeps back up to the surface. When it rained more, the springs were hearty, and the area was marshy, with ponds and lots of plant and wildlife, and animals that died around here could be buried by silt and fossilized in large numbers. Hence, the density of fossils found here.
Today, the springs in this particular area are gone, but the wash remains. The wash is generally dry, but during infrequent rains, can briefly fill and rage from here down towards Lake Mead. When it does that, it erodes down in the wash, exposing some of those ancient fossils.
Back in the early 1960s, somebody got the idea of bringing in heavy machinery to dig large swaths of silt and clay to be searched for fossils and evidence of prehistoric human habitation. This was called, "The Big Dig." Obviously, that's a pretty destructive way of excavating, and, I would think, has great potential for mixing finds in various depths (hence, various ages) together. It's not something that would be done, today.
This being a desert, and the silt and clay (caliche) are hard, and slow to erode, so those trenches from over 60 years ago are still very obvious. It's just piles of dirt and cliffs of sediments, but the potential for future research in unexcavated sections and along eroding walls obviously remains, in both the state park and the national monument. That makes interpretive signs and museum exhibits so important for lay persons such as myself.
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