44 NEBRASKAland • MARCH 2015
L
ong ago, near what is now
Kimball, a giant tortoise took its
last steps. Nearly 80 years of age,
he had grown to 350 pounds. Seven
million years later, giant machinery
bumps into his fossilized shell. He lies
in the path of progress; a new road will
cross the ancient river valley which
was his home. Close behind a rumbling
road grader walks Shane Tucker,
scanning disturbed earth for signs of
Nebraska's past.
Weeks later, dug up and wrapped
for transport, the tortoise won't
budge against a Bobcat loader's
horsepower. The tires spin uselessly.
Reinforcements come; there is no
resisting the added might of a front-end
loader, and on a drizzly morning in a
landscape the tortoise would not have
recognized, he is loaded into a truck
bound for Lincoln.
Any sizeable dug-up area in
Nebraska will likely reveal a fossil.
Some are eureka moments, but
more likely they are unnoticed small
bones or fragments tossed aside with
the dirt. Tucker, paleontologist for
the University of Nebraska State
Museum's Highway Paleontology
Program, doesn't miss the small stuff.
Walking a cut bank in dwindling
evening light alongside Highway 71,
Shane stops and reaches down. "Found
a frog's leg," he says, holding a
toothpick-sized bone pulled from where
it had lain for millions of years.
Full-time highway paleontological
programs are incredibly uncommon,
but Nebraska is fossil rich and the
Nebraska Department of Roads has a
long-standing culture of preserving our
natural history. Established by law in
Roadside
Fossils
Highway Paleontology
Text and photos by Mark Harris
The University of Nebraska State Museum has
had a long fossil-finding collaboration with the
Department of Roads, one that continues to open
roads to our ancient history.
Working late along Nebraska
Highway 71 near Kimball,
highway paleontologist Shane
Tucker excavates a 7-million-
year-old shin bone from barrel-
bodied rhino.
Shane Tucker holds the lower jaw from a "bone-crushing dog," excavated and sunlit
after eleven million years underground in Cherry County.
