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Myōkō-Togakushi Renzan NP, Nagano
Claim this place to tell your story your way.
Around 1950, fifth-grader Yoshio Tsukada spotted a fossil in a cliff on his way to school and told no one. A chance 1983 bus ride with a museum worker led to its excavation: a rare elephant jaw with all 4 molars.
Togakushisō, first collected in Togakushi, sparked a botanical feud: after Itō Atsutaro published its new genus in 1888, professor Yatabe barred him from the lab. Makino later recorded the “banished-plant incident.”
Fossil beds in Togakushi have yielded 160+ kinds of shellfish, many adapted to shallow water with cold currents. Their shells show that the Sea of Japan once spread into this now-mountainous area.
At the entrance, a 2-ton boulder crammed with fossil shells sits beside a full minke-whale skeleton—a memorable welcome to a museum built around Togakushi’s former sea.
At fossil-search sessions, the museum lets visitors split sandstone from Togakushi’s roughly 4-million-year-old seabed and clean the fossils they uncover—hands-on geology with a real ancient shell as the prize.
This natural-history museum fills a former elementary school, but its main permanent gallery is deliberately on the 3rd floor to draw visitors through the building. The museum even added an elevator the school never had.
Not all discoveries here are fossils: a 2022 survey by museum botanists found Hime-ajisai hydrangea, associated with Tomitarō Makino, at 90 Togakushi sites. Some long-established plants appear to predate World War II.
