Yesterday, my BlogBoost SiStar Martha's post celebrated National Fossil day !! I was introduced to the work of my favorite fossil finder Thomas Condon as a child, when we visited the John Day fossil beds in E.astern Oregon. An Irish immigrant, Thomas was 11 when his family arrived in NY in 1933. He studied both science and ministry, and met his wife in college. Condon first learned of the fossil beds East of Bend in 1862, and began excavating specimens in 1865. He sent them to the East coast for identification - and later tried to have them returned to Oregon. Thomas Condon in the 1870s Thomas Condon went on to teach college in Forest Grove and at the University in Eugene, and became the Oregon's first State Geologist in 1872. In our Natural History class at WOU (then OCE) in the 1970s, with Dr Kenneth Walker, we studied Condon's work and the book Ancient forests of Oregon. I love that Condon found fossils of mesohippus - the 'middle horse' ri...