Neb. - Barbara Beasley walked past the fossil remains of turtles, scattered across the bleached clay soil like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. She stopped a few times to contemplate a chunk of fossilized bone. The fossil wealth in the remote badlands and grasslands of northwestern Nebraska is well-known to scientists, who have made important discoveries there for many decades. It attracts tourists.
Dinosaurs are hot.
Blame it, perhaps, on that purple TV personality who looks like the love child of Godzilla and the Pillsbury Doughboy. Or the screamfest that Steven Spielberg created with Jurassic Park and the novel by Michael Crichton that inspired it. Scaling the steep slope of a wind-whipped hill, she came to a hole about 10 feet wide. And a lot of times tools have been left - shovels, picks, dental picks, paint brushes, trowels, you name it. Yet only in recent years have officials started viewing fossils as a resource that should be protected and managed, like wildlife, minerals or archaeological artifacts.