KVIG Informative

Tule Springs held some of the first Pleistocene fossils excavated in the Las Vegas Valley and, briefly, a closely watched theory about the earliest Americans. Federal land managers spent more than a century deciding what the ground underneath those fossils was worth, and the fight over how Southern Nevada’s remaining public land gets used hasn’t stopped since.

Josiah Spurr of the U.S. Geological Survey first reported fossilized teeth and bones eroding out of the sediment in the upper Las Vegas Wash in 1903, according to a National Park Service history of the site’s paleontology. His report went largely unexamined for three decades.

The American Museum of Natural History sent an expedition to explore the site in 1933, according to the Bureau of Land Management’s account of the monument’s history. Further investigations followed through the 1950s, the same source says.

The most consequential dig came in 1962 and 1963. Geologist C. Vance Haynes Jr. directed the Tule Springs Expedition, a multidisciplinary excavation that divided the site’s fossil-bearing sediment into the distinct layers now known as the Las Vegas Formation, according to the National Park Service’s account of the project. Haynes applied radiocarbon dating to those layers at a scale the still-new technique had not been used for at the site before.

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The dig settled the question that had drawn scientists to Tule Springs in the first place: whether early humans in North America had lived alongside the ice age mammals whose bones littered the wash. Haynes’s team found that human-made artifacts appeared only in the youngest sediment layers, the ones that no longer held fossils of Pleistocene animals, the National Park Service account says. That finding undercut the theory that people and the ice age megafauna had overlapped at the site, and scientific attention to Tule Springs receded for decades afterward.

The original 1962-63 dig sites were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, according to the Bureau of Land Management. Research at the site did not pick back up in earnest until the 2000s, when Kathleen Springer and Eric Scott of the San Bernardino County Museum led a new round of excavation that identified nearly 600 fossil localities and collected more than 40,000 vertebrate fossils, establishing what researchers now call the Tule Springs local fauna, according to the National Park Service.

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Congress designated 22,650 acres as Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument on December 19, 2014, transferring the land from Bureau of Land Management control to the National Park Service, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior. Sen. Harry Reid sponsored the legislation and Rep. Dina Titus co-sponsored it, with the cities of Las Vegas and North Las Vegas, Clark County and the Las Vegas Metro Chamber of Commerce backing the designation, the department’s announcement says.

The National Park Service asked for $327,234 from the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act’s special account in 2015 to cover signage, fencing and two temporary staff positions at the new monument, according to the Bureau of Land Management. The same 1998 law that funds Tule Springs’ upkeep also exists to sell off other tracts of federal land ringing the Las Vegas Valley for private development, financing the fossil beds’ protection with proceeds from the same kind of growth those fossils sat in the way of for more than a hundred years.