Alert: No Fuel Services: Fuel up before visiting! Agate Fossil Beds National Monument is 30-50 miles from the nearest service stations.
National Monument
Agate Fossil Beds
From the Fossil Hills Trail the Visitor Center is a ship in a sea of prairie grasses. NPS Photo
Overview
In the early 1900s, paleontologists unearthed the Age of Mammals when they found full skeletons of extinct Miocene mammals in the hills of Nebraska -- species previously only known through fragments. At the same time, an age of friendship began between rancher James Cook and Chief Red Cloud of the Lakota. These two unprecedented events are preserved and protected here... at Agate Fossil Beds.
Hike a one-mile trail back in time to the day of the paleocaster, a dry land beaver, and paleosoils, fossilized dirt from the time this landscape was formed. Look out over the vast, open table lands that define the high plaines east of the Rocky Mountains.
Hike to University (left) and Carnegie Hills. The 2.7-mile Fossil Hills Trail allows visitors to walk up to and see the famed early 1900s quarries. From these quarries, paleontologists recovered some of the world's best preserved and most complete fossilized Menoceras, Moropus, and Dinohyus skeletons.
The visitor center sits in the middle of mixed grass prairie.Tipis and Fossil Hills represent the two subjects that Agate Fossil Beds interprets.Thunderheads are common in July.The Dinohyus was a scavenger, nicknamed "Terrible Pig"This buckskin shirt decorated with quills was worn by Red Cloud.
