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TURTLES: The most often seen fossil in the Nebraska and Wyoming Badlands are TURTLES. They can be several inches from hatching to three feet and weigh several hundred pounds. Turtles are so common, yet as a complete specimen... they are scarce. Some exposures I have hunted "Badland Fossils" had so many turtles weathered into pieces, I refer to those areas as "Turtle Gulch" and "Turtle Valley". Not that they were on top of one another, but one great death bed... One level of outcrop where multiple specimens were entombed and eventually eroded out today. Virtually no other fossils are found with these mass death levels. No Oreodonts... which any Badland Fossil Collector would be very surprised. The one I recall most vividly was on the exposures of Shalimar Ranch. These were all two to three foot specimens... no smaller turtles were weathered or weathering out. The reason I even bring up "Turtles and Eggs" are they are both have immediate eye appeal to the finder and to the curious. Skulls and teeth have their novelty, but turtles and eggs... they have an instant recognition of current live specimens and these ancient ancestors. It was during the Oligocene that the entire fossil fauna and some invertebrates like the Helix sp. snails, have modern relatives, or most had others not gone extinct. We had mice, rabbits, deer, camel, horse, rhino, birds (at least as various sized eggs), lizards, snakes, etc.. This is WHY the Oligocene Badlands relates to fossil collector and the public. Turtles. I myself have encountered what I would describe as three kinds. Stylemys, Testudo and Graptemys. By far, the Stylemys is the most frequently found turtle. Although at times I refer to them as tortoise, I will leave that to Forum Members who might have spent more time studying them. It is shaped like your box turtle and I have found them 3 inches to 3 feet across. Some times you will find loose plates where rodents had gnawed. Since these turtle could not retract their heads or legs, you almost never find one with a head nor appendages intact. Skeletal parts, bone can be found in the interior, if you wanted to remove the matrix to find out or not. When one is found with a skull intact, the skull will be partially exposed from the carapace and orientated such that the skull actually stayed intact when buried. My last Stylemys with skull attached with a carapace that was "heads up" and tail down position when found. The carapace had a "lump" of extra matrix which enclosed the skull. My first and last with a skull intact! This is probably only of interest to some of you who have actively hunted Badland Fossils. Exposures extent as far North as western North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska and South Dakota with the best exposures. There are in Paleontology... splitters and lumpers. I guess I would be a liberal lumper. The splitters find any excuse to describe a "new species" and the "lumper" would explain them as male, female, juveniles, etc. I would imagine a Stylemys of South Dakota might be different from one in Central Wyoming. But for now, I recognized three distinct shapes in Nebraska. One that caught my attention, late in my collecting days, was a turtle found in Niobrara County, Wyoming at a ranch that would be considered Chadron Member of the White River Formation. Not far from this turtle was a weathered skull of a Hoplophoneus saber tooth. The badlands had a light green tint... which to an experienced White River Formation fossil hunter... pond water or river channel. It was not a river channel as is was not gritty and full of Titanothere parts. A pond. And weathered upside down was a turtle... which ended up being the first "pond turtle" or aquatic turtle I had ever found. I add several photographs with this post. A pond turtle find was unusual, but it was bottom... up. It was upside down. I took the entire block of light green matrix that it was within and prepped it so I could pick the turtle up and replace it into the matrix. When I flipped it over... the top carapace had Hoplophoneus upper canine punctures! This is why I felt this story was necessary. Obviously cats liked pond turtles, too. Not far from this pond turtle I found a weathered Hoplophoneus skull... skull and no skeletal parts. Other than the turtle and cat... there were no other fossils in the general area. Just odd, This finishes the story of my Graptemys inornata pond turtle. EGGS: Mostly referred to as Duck Eggs because of the similar sizes. But there are also smaller bird eggs found. Most eggs are the hollowed shell that has filled with clay (Badlands). The eggs show the exact detail of the porous nature... much like our common chicken egg. The brown Chalcedony eggs I have seen were entirely north of Crawford, Nebraska. These eggs had been XRayed to see if any bones existed... and at that time none were found. Even the "badland" filled white shelled specimens also have never given up any secrets... yet. The majority of egg finds are associated with the Chadron Member and mostly in the green tinted sediments... ponds. The eggs were laid, the pond had excessive runoff into it, flooded the nests and... presto... buried to be found 38,000,000 years later. Where one egg is found... others are sure to be weathering out in the future. I have found most of mine as sporadic in white fine grained badlands. North of Crawford and north of Harrison, Nebraska, Often they are "crushed" with cracks along the compressed edges. I have found a few weathering out of the badlands and some weathered out in the Chadron "flats". My theory on Eggs is that those found are infertile. This explains why no near hatchlings are to be found from XRays of perfectly preserved eggs... as delicate an egg is to fossilized... there is no reason why one or more would not give up an unhatched chick. Had there been a unhatched chick... when buried the decomposition of the chick, would expand the egg and prevent it from being preserved as a fossil egg. Breaking into parts and little chance of preservation. I have never found loose egg shell. I have never found any bird skull and leave a possibility of bone... if complete enough to distinguish it from a large rodent bone. Just have not been that lucky. In a way, this is intended to enhance your knowledge of two well known fossils of the Badlands. This does not include possible turtle eggs and the beetle pupae that I suspect... but nobody has found any among a large turtle, as far as I know. So my not knowing exactly what the turtle egg looks like, leaves a big vacuum in knowledge. I have one "possible turtle egg" that is round with unusual cracking about the diameter of a nickel, 3/4 inch. I found it digging around some odds and ends this morning in storage. Reference for Turtle Collectors: I recommend one book concerning Fossil Turtles. Strange enough there is a similar title... but Fossil Lizards, which also occur in a good variety in the Badlands. Fossil Turtles of North America by O. P. Hay- 1908- Carnegie Institution of Washington Fossil Lizards of North America by Charles W. Gilmore- 1928- National Academy of Sciences Why, you ask does Ray go on about some subjects? When I was first collecting, it was very difficult to get any information on my fossils. Common, unusual and very rare. It was a challenge. Now I have the majority of references and no place to hunt in the near future. So for those of you who are so fortunate to be still active, please make use of these references.