Day Beds

John Day Fossil Beds National Monument is a 14,000 acre (57 km²) park near Kimberly, Oregon. Located within the John Day River Basin, this U.S. more...

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National Monument is world-renowned for its well-preserved, remarkably complete record of fossil plants and animals, a record that spans more than 40 of the 65 million years of the Cenozoic Era (also known as the Age of Mammals and Flowering Plants). The monument is divided into three units: Painted Hills (named for the delicately colored stratifications) northwest of Mitchell, Sheep Rock which is northwest of Dayville, and Clarno which is 20 miles west of Fossil. Blue Basin is a volcanic ash bowl transformed into claystone by eons of erosion, colored pastel blue by minerals.

Visitors can follow trails into the badlands and examine fossils displayed at the visitor center while scientists continue field investigations and the painstaking analysis of the monument's vast fossil record.

The fossil beds contain vestiges of the actual soils, rivers, ponds, watering holes, mudslides, ashfalls, floodplains, middens, trackways, prairies, and forests, in an unbroken sequence that is one of the longest continuous geological records. The rocks are rich with the evidence of ancient habitats and the dynamic processes that shaped them; they tell of sweeping changes in the John Day Basin. Great changes, too, have taken place in this area's landscape, climate, and in the kinds of plants and animals that have inhabited it.

The strata represented at John Day Fossil Beds consist of four geologic formations, presented here from top (most recent) to bottom (oldest):

Rattlesnake Formation (8 - 6 mya);

These most recent strata, named for typical exposures along Rattlesnake Creek, are less fossiliferous than the older formations but contain fragmentary fossils of horses, sloths, rhinos, camels, peccaries, pronghorns, dogs, bears and others, with a preponderence of grazing animals over browsers, betokening a dry, cool climate that was dominated by grasslands.

Mascall Formation (15 - 12 mya);

This is a warmer, wetter period. At its base, a roughly five-million-year interval between deposition of the Mascall Formation and the John Day Formation that underlies it is marked by intermittent flows of basaltic lava that repeatedly leveled and denuded the region. A period of moderate climate ensued, with more precipitation than today's, building up some 200 m of fluvial-lacustrine siltstones and sandstones that are the remains of highly fertile volcanic soil which supported a lush mixture of hardwood forest and open savanna grassland, already home to a great variety of recognizable horses, camels, and deer, as well as bears, weasels, dogs, and cats. At the same time large mammals made a resurgence: among them were the gomphotheres rhinos and bear-dogs.

John Day Formation (37 - 20 mya);

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