Agate Fossil Beds NM

the Niobrara River crossing the Agate Fossil Beds National Monument

a daphoenodon pursuing a daeodon

mixed-grass prairie, Agate Fossil Beds National Monument

For a while growing up, a new book arrived in the mail once a month from a series by National Geographic. My favorite one was about the Age of Mammals. Somehow I could relate more to the bizarre looking giant boars and tiny horses on savannas than dinosaurs in jungles.

The Niobrara river valley in which the Agate Fossil Beds National Monument sits looks similar to how it did 20 million years ago. It's so easy to go outside here and, with your imagination, watch a nature show on the "plains of Africa" in in which these bone-crushing scavengers and beardogs scrambled for survival as their watering holes dried up.

Great Plains scavenger hunt item #7: Cenozoic era fossils

The Cenozoic Era is the age of new life. During the Cenozoic, mammals diverged from a few small, simple, generalized forms into a diverse collection of terrestrial, marine, and flying animals, giving this period its other name, the Age of Mammals, despite the fact that birds still outnumbered mammals two to one. The Cenozoic is just as much the age of savannas, the age of co-dependent flowering plants and insects, and the age of birds. Grass also played a very important role in this epoch, shaping the evolution of the birds and mammals that fed on it.