Book - The Lost World of Fossil Lake: Snapshots from Deep Time

We are proud to carry one of the seminal books about the Green River Formation, Dr. Lance Grande’s The Lost World of Fossil Lake: Snapshots from Deep Time. Grande first published The Lost World of Fossil Lake in 2013, situating his comprehensive account of the region’s rich natural history within the high mountain desert ghost town of Fossil, Wyoming. Today, the region is an arid picture of the American West, but 52 million years ago, southeastern Wyoming and parts of Utah and Colorado were a connected system of subtropical intermountain lakes teeming with life!

Today, what we call Fossil Lake sits in the Fossil Butte Member of the Green River Formation, and thanks to Grande, you’ll read one of the world’s best accounts of this incredible region by one of its most esteemed advocates and researchers. Explore over 400 pages detailing not just the area’s rich local history and characters but its even richer troves of fossilized life and knowledge of the Eocene, including hundreds of full-color photographs of some of the best and most beautiful specimens quarried from the formation. Follow Grande’s engaging narrative through the layers of time recorded at Fossil Lake, starting with the first commercial quarries and today’s bustling operations and working backward into the midst of Fossil Lake’s diverse lacustrine environments in their prime, learning the ins and outs of this ancient ecosystem. This book is an excellent crash course in paleontology, paleoecology, and geology all in one, written with true passion by an expert in the field.

Grande currently serves as the Negaunee Distinguished Service Curator at Chicago’s Field Museum, and has decades of expertise on palaeoecology and evolutionary biology of ray-finned fishes, particularly within the Fossil Basin areas of southeastern Wyoming. Through his guidance and collaborations with other institutions, the Field Museum’s collection of fossil fish has become one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world.

We are proud to be a carrier for Grande’s excellent work. Order your copy of The Lost World of Fossil Lake today and expand your literary horizons!