The epoch of coal is ending. Could an extraordinary fossil deposit help Kemmerer survive? | Wyoming News

Long before dry winds scoured its characteristic plains, the state was a muggy, swampy, almost tropical place. Palm fronds drifted in air thick with bird calls and the buzzing of cicadas. Horses’ tiny cousins bounded like rabbits through ferns and cattails. Lemur-like early primates climbed easily from maples to sycamores to trees that never left prehistory.

The forest bordered a trio of vast lakes that stretched across millions of acres of Wyoming, Utah and Colorado, teeming with freshwater shrimp, stingrays, turtles, crocodiles and the primitive relatives of herrings and perch.

Most of those creatures lived and died without a trace. But every once in a while, one sank to the bottom, where it was engulfed by oxygen-deprived muck, and didn’t decay.

Beneath the aptly named Fossil Lake, remnants from the Eocene epoch survived, intact, compressed between flaky sheets of limestone that became stripes on the hills of southwestern Wyoming. The fossils have been a curiosity since the 1850s. In recent years, their intrigue has quietly spread.

Traces of the lush Eocene, meanwhile, also constitute the region’s youngest coal. And it was coal, not fossils, that came to define the mining towns that sprouted there in the 1890s. The city of Kemmerer was named after its coal mine; the adjacent town of Diamondville after the rocks’ luster. The energy reserves have fueled life there for generations.

“The Kemmerer-Diamondville community was born on coal,” said Kemmerer Mayor Bill Thek. “Cattle and ranching was here already, but when coal came about, the community grew into what it is today. And then, subsequent to that, you had the oil and gas industry.”

About 70 of the towns’ combined 3,500 residents work at the local Naughton Power Plant, where both coal-fired units are scheduled to close in 2025, and the remaining unit, recently converted to burn natural gas, is set to follow in 2029. The nearby Kemmerer Mine has employed even higher numbers, mostly to supply the power plant. Losing its top customer risks rendering the mine obsolete.

Without the power plant, the towns feared they would “dry up and blow away,” Thek said.

“Those are not my words,” he added. “Those are words that people used.”

The towns urgently needed a new economic engine. Thek and other officials sought novel energy projects willing to settle in their remote corner of Wyoming. They landed a first-of-its-kind nuclear reactor that the developer, TerraPower, plans to build near the power plant and staff with retrained Naughton workers. And they’re in talks with two companies hoping to use coal from the mine to make other products, like fertilizer.

“All of a sudden, when it rains, it pours, and we have all of this growth that we’re looking forward to,” Thek said. The challenge now will be figuring out how to accommodate everyone.

The shift is already visible. Buyers are competing to snap up vacant houses and commercial properties. Across Kemmerer’s triangular town square from the original J.C. Penney store, a wood-shingled storefront that has changed hands repeatedly over the last several years bears the name of a brand-new coffee shop: Fossil Fuel.

Its logo, like Kemmerer’s, contains a skeletal fish.

Fossilized fish — especially small, schooling Knightia — are so common around Kemmerer that a few hours of prying apart rock at dig-your-own quarry American Fossil yields piles of them, flattened, golden-brown, preserved down to their threadlike bones. That same dig might also reveal other, bigger fish, or shrimp, or crayfish, or leaves. But there will be no shortage of Knightia.

Wyoming’s state fossil is found almost exclusively in the quarries near Kemmerer. The sheer volume of specimens makes Knightia the most abundant whole vertebrate fossil ever discovered.

Kemmerer proved too small to support multiple grocery stores; it’s down to only one. Fossils, including the Fossil Butte National Monument, a short drive from town, bring in enough tourism to keep four specialty shops open. The industry generates millions of dollars in revenue every year, though it still contributes well below 10% of Kemmerer’s total income, according to Brian Muir, the city administrator. He couldn’t provide exact numbers.

“It’s not going to replace coal mine jobs,” Muir said. “It’s not that good. But it’s good.”

The people selling fossils in Kemmerer don’t really want their shops and quarries to become a stand-in for coal. They don’t want the industry to end up sustaining the town on its own. Instead, for the most part, they hope to ease the extent to which their community depends on energy.

Almost across the board, they say there is still room for the fossil business to expand, and a lack of visibility is holding it back. The Fossil Lake deposits, little-known outside Wyoming, are considered niche even in Kemmerer, where energy is a familiar ally, and fossils, despite their tenure, are not.

“I just think it’s been the culture in Kemmerer that nobody cares about the fossils. They’re nothing. They don’t make any money,” said Stacey Sherman, co-owner of In Stone Fossils.

Most town residents have never been to her store, which gives those who drop by a better sense of the fossils’ worth, she said. “But we have seen more locals coming in, so I think it’s just a matter of time.”

Sherman’s company is only about 9 years old, and has been in its current location for closer to 3, but her connection to fossils stretches back much farther. She’s part of the fourth generation of her family to frequent the quarries. Her parents ran Tynskys Fossils, another Kemmerer shop now in the care of her brother and her sister-in-law, Kodi Tynsky, who was also raised in Kemmerer, but without much exposure to fossils.

Tynsky figures locals encounter the industry so infrequently that the majority have never come to understand fossils.

“I was one of them, growing up here,” she said. “And did I pay attention? No.”

Before she and her husband took over his family’s fossil business, Tynsky was a hairdresser. She owned her own salon in Star Valley, about two hours north of Kemmerer, for 14 years. Then, four years ago, at a time when Kemmerer’s situation looked especially dire, she left her career for an industry she knew next to nothing about.

“I had to learn a lot,” she said. “But it’s been awesome.”

Tynsky married into a family of fossil devotees. Like her husband, her father-in-law — Sherman’s father — still digs fossils whenever he can. He’s unearthed numerous treasures over the decades, including a 13-foot crocodile, a 6-foot turtle and, in 2003, a three-toed horse that is unlike any other Fossil Lake find and currently on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

Sherman often tagged along as a child. She has known fossils all her life. “The joke was, when I was littler, that I would play with rocks in my playpen on the quarry,” she laughed.

At the time, quarrying near Kemmerer was a primarily wholesale enterprise. Aside from serious collectors, most customers were looking to stock shops elsewhere. Knightia fossils were packed up alongside more exotic finds and carted to fossil shows or shipped off to retailers.

Wholesale is still part of the mix for Kemmerer’s fossil shops. These days, however, the same shops might sell a single Knightia for as little as $5 or for more than $100, depending on its quality. Larger pieces often go for thousands. Interest in buying fossils directly from the source has ballooned, not only because of the rise of online shopping, particularly in the early months of the pandemic, but because fossils are more accessible than they used to be.

“All these people who want to be paleontologists but never knew how to go about it — now you have social media, where they can get on there and learn,” Sherman said.

In Stone tapped into that pent-up interest. It has amassed close to 70,000 followers on Instagram and more than 530,000 followers on TikTok, where its top videos — featuring Sherman’s husband at the quarry, peeling away the rock to expose layers crowded with Knightia — have each racked up millions of views.

Its popularity is having an effect, Sherman said: In Stone’s followers have started showing up in Kemmerer, where several quarries, including hers, let tourists dig fossils themselves. Those visitors also eat at the restaurants, stop at the gas stations, stay at the hotels and end up spending money all over town. As Sherman sees it, the more Kemmerer promotes its fossils, the better off the community will be.

“Yeah, I have a business, I went to it to survive, but tourism is going to make all the businesses survive,” she said. “It will help everything here.”

Kemmerer is used to weathering the booms and busts of the oil and gas industry, growing during the good years and shrinking during the bad ones. The long-term decline of coal is no ordinary bust, though, and the optimism that Kemmerer has figured out how to save itself mingles with unease about the years that will pass before its new energy projects are complete.

Fossil sales can be fickle, too — the state of the economy influences how much people will travel and spend — but those swings often happen separately from the ups and downs of the energy market.

It’s generally accepted in Kemmerer that boosting tourism would help stabilize the local economy. Leaders are pushing for an off-road trail system that would connect to trails in Utah and Idaho, making hunting, fishing and other outdoor opportunities near Kemmerer easier to reach.

Kemmerer and Diamondville also share the Fossil Basin Promotion Board, a government body tasked with advertising local events and attractions, paid for with the lodging tax collected from stays at hotels, motels and short-term rentals. The board is a sore spot for some in the fossil industry.

While its Instagram page is active, its Facebook hasn’t been updated in close to a year. The phone number on its website redirects callers to a mailbox that says it “can’t accept more messages” and then disconnects. An emailed request for comment was not returned.

The towns are situated halfway between the tourist destinations of Park City, Utah and Jackson, Wyoming. Detouring through Kemmerer tacks an extra 10 minutes onto the more than four-hour drive, but because the main route hugs Wyoming’s western border, most people miss the fossils by about 25 miles. With the dig season and the national parks’ tourist season both running from about mid-May to mid-October, the fossil sellers think many more travelers would work the quarries into their plans if they knew those quarries existed.

And for the people who already pass straight through on U.S. Route 30, a major east-west highway, or on U.S. Route 189, and drive off still unaware of the fossils, shop owners want a new sign posted at city limits:

“Welcome to Kemmerer, the fossil fish capital of the world.”

Fossils brought the Dunnavants, an Oregon family of paleontology enthusiasts, to Kemmerer in late July. Excited shouts rose regularly from their section of pre-cut rock at American Fossil, a quarry that prides itself on being affordable for families and safe for children, with crews that bulldoze the cliff’s fossil-rich layers and then lay them out in a roped-off dig site some distance away.

American Fossil also distinguishes itself by letting people keep every fossil they find. (Technically, the landowner the company leases from will receive partial ownership of any fossil worth more than $100,000, but that hasn’t happened yet.) It sells some fossils as well, but digs make up the bulk of its business.

Twelve-year-old Jackson Dunnavant found no shortage of fish that day. Several of the rocks he carefully chiseled apart also revealed finds exciting enough for quarry staff — many of them local, each a fossil guru in their own right — to come take a look.

Dunnavant was captivated. Every fossil he pried open felt “like opening a door to a world that hasn’t been discovered yet,” he said.

When Patrick Hogle, a former high school biology and earth science teacher, started American Fossil in 2016, education remained his top priority. He wanted to share his newfound fascination with fossils with the public.

“Every time I find a Knightia, I’m excited,” Hogle said. “That was a fish that lived in this lake. And every fossil tells a story.”

His mission at American Fossil is to send customers home with a carload of fossils and a new appreciation for the place they came from. He considers it his responsibility to balance access and conservation, prioritizing the quality of the experience over the quantity of tourists served. After all, he said, “they’re not making any more Fossil Lake.”

Hogle, who grew up on the other side of the Utah border, is also trying to bridge the divide between his adopted community and their fossils. Residents have always been friendly to him, he said, but few were interested in the work he does.

He now invites out locals who have never been to the quarry and waives the fee for the Kemmerer Senior Center and the third-graders who come on field trips. (Second- and fourth-graders go to Fossil Butte.) And he thinks his outreach — evidence that fossils hold real value and can attract real interest — is starting to change the local perception.

“This is a world-class fossil resource, and it’s one that people can actually experience,” Hogle said. “This is something I wish people in Kemmerer would take more pride in.”

Over the last six years, American Fossil’s customers have produced about 11 scientifically significant finds, he said. Per quarry policy, once a fossil has been studied, it’s returned to the person who found it. Some have ultimately donated their discoveries, including a boy about Dunnavant’s age whose fossilized bird ended up in the Yale Peabody Museum.

“I want this to be a laboratory of citizen science,” Hogle said.

He has opened his share of the cliffs to the scientific community as well. Fossil fish haven’t been researched nearly as extensively as dinosaurs, and Hogle thinks they should be.

“If you study dinosaurs,” he said, “there’s so few found, you can’t get an ecological understanding. You can’t see the whole ecosystem. You’re getting snapshots, these little tiny blurbs, and your sample size is one or two. When you’re looking here, your sample size is huge.”

Hogle said he’s struggled to attract academics to the quarry, especially for long-term exploration. But in June, University of Wyoming researchers investigating how quickly the lake filled collected ash samples from American Fossil and two other quarries. And a team from Fossil Butte is slowly working through a donated segment of rock.

“One of our other goals,” Hogle said, “is to get everyone to go to the national monument.”

He built a miniature museum in a shack beside the office, a wooden room ringed with panels detailing the history of the region and the fossils it contains, giving visitors a glimpse of what the monument has to offer.

Fossil Butte is barred from most types of self-promotion. Like other protected sites managed by the National Park Service, the monument, established in 1972, relies largely on advertising and word-of-mouth from local officials and businesses.

“The tourists hear about the quarries because that’s their interest,” said Arvid Aase, Fossil Butte’s museum curator. “But they need to learn about us.”

During the first four summers of the 1990s, Aase, then a graduate student, worked in the quarries near Kemmerer. He took his first seasonal job at Fossil Butte in 1995. When he became a full-time monument employee three years later, the museum, upgraded at the start of that decade from a trailer to a several-thousand-square-foot visitor center, exhibited only 80 fossils.

“There wasn’t really a good working relationship between the park and the quarriers before that,” Aase said. “They just didn’t really communicate a lot.”

Fossil Butte interprets its directive from Congress — to “preserve for the benefit and enjoyment of present and future generations outstanding paleontological sites” and “provide for the display and interpretation of scientific specimens” — to mean it should limit quarrying on monument land and keep every fossil it finds.

The monument has been digging since 1997 in a single 12-foot by four-foot quarry, Aase said. “That’s a long time to work that one block of rock. Why? Over 5,000 fossils have been recorded and collected from there. We’re on our 14th museum cabinet. We don’t have the space to work quickly.”

Nearly all of the fossils displayed in its museum have been donated or sold by the surrounding quarries.

“When I started working here, because I’d worked in the quarries, I got that relationship going on,” Aase said. The museum’s collection is now up to 400 specimens, and many of the quarries call him about unusual finds. The monument suggests visitors check out the quarries. The quarries direct people to the monument. “We do see them come in,” Aase said, “because they’re all dusty.”

Activity fluctuates at Kemmerer’s fossil attractions, even at the height of the season. American Fossil might serve 20 customers one day and 100 the next. But according to Hogle, the quarry is nearing its seasonal capacity.

“We’re more limited by how much rock we can get out in space or time,” Hogle said. American Fossil refers some inquirers to other Kemmerer quarries, which refer others back to him.

“We’re competitors,” he said, “but at the end of the day, I can’t take all the tourists right now. And I want them busy. I think there’s plenty of opportunity there.”

About six of Kemmerer’s roughly 14 active quarries are open to tourists. A dig at American Fossil is priced at $69 per adult and $49 per child for two hours and $89 and $69, respectively, for four hours. Ulrich’s Fossil Gallery, down the road from the Fossil Butte Visitor Center, offers all-day digs for $125 per adult. Two hours with a guide at Tynskys costs $150 per person. A private night dig with In Stone starts at $750 each.

Night digs are typical at the height of the summer, when daytime temperatures easily top 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Atop the scrubby hills, where shade is hard to come by, sunburns begin within minutes. And while American Fossil sits near the shore of the former lake, many of the private dig sites are closer to the center, where the fossils, tinged darker brown, aren’t necessarily exposed when the rock separates.

“You’ll split it where the rock wants to split,” said Robert Bowen, a Kemmerer city council member and owner of Wyoming Fossils. “All the fish are not on a natural splitting layer.”

Shallow ridges in the rock are often the only indication a fossil is there. Those ridges are easiest to spot at night, when the slanted artificial light skips over them and leaves shadows on the fossils.

“In the daytime, we’d have to take every rock and turn every rock in the sun to look for fossils,” Bowen said. “It’s something we still do. It’s just that much more work, especially when you get big pieces.”

Quarry workers on their hands and knees trace the outlines in pencil so they can see what to remove during the day. They might cut the fossils out individually, or hammer multiple chisels into the bottom and then work together to lift away thick slabs, bracing shoulder-to-shoulder, gripping the chisels, heaving upward. The smell of oil emanates from the rock as it gives way.

Some workers are hired by the summer. Others stay in the business year-round, cleaning their troves of not-yet-visible fossils through the long off-season.

While Bowen leads the occasional night dig, he does most of his work without tourists around. Every fossil shop has its own niche, he said, and retail, especially in-store, is his. He also cleans fossils for tourists who visited quarries that don’t.

“That’s how we can all survive here,” Bowen said. “We have different business models, so we’re not conflicting. We’re not clashing.”

Where In Stone branched into the online market, Tynskys stuck mostly with wholesale. And Ulrich’s continues to sell its highest-value pieces to many of the same collectors who have bought them for decades.

The whole of Kemmerer now faces a turning point its fossil industry knows all too well.

“You evolve,” Bowen said, “or you die.”

His shop, on Kemmerer’s main road, sits a few blocks from In Stone, across the triangle from Tynskys, catty-corner from the new coffee shop. He owns six of the nearby storefronts, too. Four are empty. He’s storing fossils in another. But he recently rented one to a fly-fishing outfitter, and has also been approached about a dance studio and a print shop.

“I’ve got people interested in every one of them,” he said. “They’re just not ready yet.”

Years of inactivity have taken their toll on the buildings. The money required to finish the most extensive renovations will come as the first businesses open their doors. It’s the same way throughout Kemmerer, where the deterioration slowed as local prospects brightened, but the lucrative new industries the community now awaits will be slow to settle in.

The fossil industry is already there.