As the old phrase goes, one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. If that’s really true, then the Petrified Forest has a lot of treasure from 50 years or more ago.
The National Park Service is preserving a lot of what Route 66 drivers and passengers threw out the windows in the mid-20th century and is trying to put it into historical perspective.
William Parker is a paleontologist at Petrified Forest National Park.