Back in the 1950s and 1960s, a man very dear to us, named
Jack Baker owned Pike Forest Fossil Beds. In 1969 the federal
government appropriated his tourist trap to create the Florissant
Fossil Beds National Monument. Before the US Park Service
took over, he spirited away his fossil bed collection and stored
it at his home on South Institute in Colorado Springs. It remained
there, untouched, until his death in 1994. After Jack passed away,
we arranged through his estate's attorney to purchase all of Jack's
personal possessions. We've kept his fossil collection in storage
until last June 2008, when we finally unpacked it.
This link will take you to some pictures of Jack Baker's Pike Forest.
Did you know that the petrified tree at Disneyland came from Jack Baker's
forest?
Photographing and cataloging the collection is a daunting task. It currently stored in
very large flat tupperware boxes, carefully wrapped in paper tissue. Some specimens
are labeled, many are not. I am not entirely convinced that the specimens that have
labels are accurately labeled. I have high confidence that all the fossils did indeed
originate from Jack's forest.
There are leaves, flowers, cones, stem & branch casts, insects (bees, wasps, and various
flies) and other assorted plants and bugs. By my count, there are 155 individual specimens
in this collection. The number was a little higher, but we sold a few on Ebay in October. If
you were a winning bidder - congratulations! Many of the specimens have multiple fossil
imprints. Some on both sides. There are a lot of fossils here, if that appeals to you. Most
fossils from Florissant ended up in the country's great institutional collections, such
as the
Peabody and the Field
museum. We visited Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in
September 2008, and I believe these specimens are better than what was on display at the
Monument.
For the purposes of estimating the cost of shipping, asume 52# and 4 boxes, from Zip 97032
For the sake for full disclosure, there is one thing that I do not find charming about this
collection: the technique he used for fossil "preservation". Evidently in that time period, some
amateur paleontologists were smitten with the notion of using shellac to "preserve" their
specimens. Many of the fossils in this collection suffer from this well-intended abuse.
Here are a couple of pages of closup fossil pictures from the Pike Forest Fossil Beds
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