Black Gold

The tooth was wrong, but the place was right. The layer of carbonaceous clay above Coal Vein No. 3 in the Eagle Mine, where the tooth came from in 1926, proved to hold a new fauna of Paleocene mammals. Barnum Brown collected there for the American Museum in 1927 and J. LeRoy Kay for the Carnegie Museum, and in 1928 Rachel Husband soaked the mine's roof shale for jaws and teeth of primates and insectivores. George Gaylord Simpson described the fauna, with Dr. J. C. F. Siegfriedt, the physician who had taken the tooth for human, among the authors.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Smith Mine — steps away
  Rusting buildings beside the highway, all that is left of the mine where Montana's worst coal disaster emptied a valley.
• Beartooth Highway — 13 mi
  A road over the top of the world, built because a coal town's mines closed and it needed tourists instead.

More markers nearby

• The Smith Mine Disaster — steps away
• Bearcreek — 1.5 mi
• Red Lodge — 3.1 mi
• The Beartooth Plateau — 3.1 mi