In the 1980s and 1990s, the National Parks Service commissioned Heinrich Berann to produce gorgeous, panoramic paintings of America's beautiful national parks as part of an advertising campaign; this week the NPS published high-resolution scans of these images for free downloading. Read the rest

Indian Country Today shares the decades long investigation into Effigy Mounds National Monument's missing bones. A large number of human remains went missing, and no one could track them down. Turns out park superintendent Thomas Munson had stashed them in his garage. Munson hid the bones to avoid returning the funerary objects they were buried with, and were on display in the parks museum, to their ancestors.

Via ICTMN:

It’s like something out of a Stephen King story. An aging National Park Service superintendent steals the remains of hundreds of ancient medicine men and leaders and sticks them under a workbench in his garage in cardboard boxes. It’s 1990 and NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, is about to go into effect. The superintendent suspects the remains will have to be returned to the Native tribes in the area because of NAGPRA. He’s not worried about that so much, but he fears also having to return the funerary objects that were buried with them thousands of years ago, objects now on display in the park’s museum. He hides the bones in his garage.

Then, after sitting there for years, the bones suddenly come to life and possess the park superintendent, taking control of his body and forcing him to start killing people.

Ok, so, that last part didn’t really happen. But the first part did, according to a timeline prepared by current Effigy Mounds National Monument superintendent Jim Nepstad. The timeline shows how approximately 2,200 human bone fragments where stolen from the park’s museum collection and hidden in former superintendent Thomas Munson’s garage for over 20 years while park employees and several state agencies half-heartedly searched for them.