Orchard Grad To Star In Paleontology Documentary

Natalie Bruzon
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Nebraska has a lot to boast. History, beautiful prairie lands, fertile grounds.

And fossils. 

Michael Voohries, Orchard High School graduate, has dedicated his life to uncovering the ancient mammal bones in Nebraska’s rocks. 

Next Wednesday, a documentary featuring him and other well-known paleontologists will air on N.E.T. at 7 p.m. 

“This new program is about the story of prehistoric animal life in the great plains, and how they discover fossils and try to figure out what they are . . . This film that Gary Hochman made sort of tries to put together a story starting about 40 million years ago,” said Voohries. “(Using) the different deposits that have been found that try to put together the story of what happened to different kinds of animals through time.”

Voohries said the rocks in Nebraska work as a time capsule, showing paleontologists today what the world looked like millions of years ago. Ashfall Fossil Beds is one of the many active dig sites around the state. 

“Nebraska just happens to have a very good record of what happened after the age of dinosaurs,” Voohries explained. “We don’t have  much in the way of dinosaurs in Nebraska . . . But we have a very good record of the kinds of animal life that lived here after the age of dinosaurs. So that’s really what the focus of Gary’s film is.”

The time period the documentary explores is known as the “Age of the Mammals,” which, Voohries said, included animals like “horses and camels and elephants and rhinos and saber tooth cats and giant bone crushing wolves and all kinds of interesting things.”

“If kids have seen the movie “Ice Age,” for instance, a lot of the characters in that movie “Ice Age” are based on creatures that we actually find in Nebraska,” Voohries said. “Mammoths and sloths and things like that.”
The documentary uses computer animation to reconstruct what prehistoric mammals looked like. 

“They have some nice animations that start with the skeleton and then they sort of put the flesh and muscles and things back on skeletons and kind of bring them to life,” Voohries said excitedly. “I think people will kind of get a kick out of seeing that process.”

The documentary also features Mitteis Gravel. 

“There’s not a gravel pit in Nebraska that doesn’t have fossils,” said Voohries. “I think ( Metties Gravel) was handy since it’s probably the closest gravel pit to the Ashfall Fossil Bed. Curt has been very nice about letting the museum folks go in and they occasionally find interesting fossils there at the Mitteis pit.”

According to Voohries, the Nebraska is full of prehistoric mammal fossils, but Ashfalls is the only active dig set up for visitors. 

“The park opened up in 1991,” said Voohries. “Most places, when we find fossils we just take them out of the ground and bring them down to the museum and they try to clean things up and put things back together like a jigsaw puzzle . . . But in the case of Ashfall, we decided the skeletons probably look better in the ground.”

Voohries discovered Ashfall in 1971 and started the dig immediately.

“Clear back to the 1970s I took students out (there), this was long before Ashfalls was a park,” Voohries explained. “I was involved in some of the early digs out there and then there was an article about Ashfalls, or what we now call Ashfalls, in the National Geographic magazine.”

The National Geographic Society had sponsored the first Ashfall digs, and it was an article published in the magazine that put Ashfalls on the map. 

“When there was an article about the 1970s dig in the National Geographic magazine, some well-to-do people out in Omaha actually got the bright idea that they would buy the farm there,” said Voohries. “They bought the property and they donated it to the state game and parks commission to turn into a park.”

Voohries Orchard roots lead to his interest in paleontology, as well as the discovery of Ashfalls. 

A 1958 graduate of Orchard High School, Voohries spent his childhood days running around looking for bugs and cool rocks. 

“I grew up in Orchard and I guess I was always an outdoor kid,” Voohries said. “I enjoyed going out and hiking around. I was in boy scouts and all that and I spent quite a bit of time just kind of roaming the hills around there. I was interested in all kinds of things--animals and plants and bugs.”

According to Voohries, it’s not hard to find fossils in Nebraska, and he often found interesting things like petrified wood.

“One of the things that you will find pretty much in any part of Nebraska, if you keep your eyes open, you’ll actually see parts of fossils,” Voohries said. 

During one of the family visits to the old schoolhouse that use to stand four miles north of town, Voohries made his first exciting discovery.

“About four miles north of orchard there was a little country school and there was a creek running through the property there,” remembered Voohries. “You’d always find these pretty rocks and petrified wood and I remember one time I found this big shiny thing, kind of looked like a tooth. 

Voohries took the rock to school and showed it to his teacher, who said she might know who could help them identify it.

“She took it on herself to mail it down to the museum in Lincoln and we got this nice letter back saying that yes, it was a fossil tooth, it was from a giant camel,” said Voohries. “They use to live in Nebraska millions of years ago, so if you’re a little kid that’s a pretty big deal when somebody tells you you’ve found something important.”

This fueled Voohries interest in fossils. When he went to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to start his bachelors, he chose to pursue pharmacology but included a geology class in his course loud. 

“My great grandpa and my grandpa ran the drugstore in Orchard for years and years and years,” said Voohries. “When I was a kid I worked in the drugstore and I always thought that was kind of an interesting thing to do so I thought I would study pharmacy.”

But, the summer of his freshmen year Voohries got a job collecting fossils in western Nebraska, and he immediately knew he needed to pursue his studies in geology and paleontology. 

Most of his life, Voohries has dedicated his research to the fossils Nebraska has to offer. Even when he was completing his graduate studies in Wyoming, or when he taught for a brief period in Georgia, he continued returning to Orchard and exploring the fossils in the area. 

Today, Voohries is retired in Lincoln, NE, but he still takes the time to return to Orchard, Nebraska, where he made his first discovery.