[Rockhounds] The Yellowstone supervolcano destroyed an ecosystem but saved it for us

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

Death was everywhere. Animal corpses littered the landscape and were mired
in the local waterhole as ash swept around everything in its path. For
some, death happened quickly; for others, it was slow and painful.

This was the scene in the aftermath of a supervolcanic eruption in Idaho,
approximately 1,600 kilometers (900 miles) away. It was an eruption so
powerful that it obliterated the volcano itself, leaving a crater 80
kilometers (50 miles) wide and spewing clouds of ash that the wind carried
over long distances, killing almost everything that inhaled it. This was
particularly true here, in this location in Nebraska, where animals large
and small succumbed to the eruption’s deadly emissions.

Eventually, all traces of this horrific event were buried; life continued,
evolved, and changed. That's why, millions of years later in the summer of
1971, Michael Voorhies was able to enjoy another delightful day of
exploring.

He was, as he had been each summer between academic years, creating a
geologic map of his hometown in Nebraska. This meant going from farm to
farm and asking if he could walk through the property to survey the rocks
and look for fossils. “I’m basically just a kid at heart, and being a
paleontologist in the summer was my idea of heaven,” Voorhies, now retired
from the University of Georgia, told Ars.

What caught his eye on one particular farm was a layer of volcanic
ash—something treasured by geologists and paleontologists, who use it to
get the age of deposits. But as he got closer, he also noticed
<https://nebraskastudies.org/en/pre-1500/ashfall/michael-voorhies-discovery/>
exposed
bone. “Finding what was obviously a lower jaw which was still attached to
the skull, now that was really quite interesting!” he said. “Mostly what
you find are isolated bones and teeth.”

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/07/the-pompeii-of-paleontology-preserves-a-time-when-rhinos-roamed-nebraska/