You're visiting a national monument or park, say Death Valley, and you see signs asking you not to take any rocks home with you. And you think, who are they kidding? There are millions of rocks, and no one will miss them.
Which brings us to Fossil Cycad National Monument in South Dakota, created by President Warren Harding in 1922. A cycad is a fossilized plant, about 120 million years old, and is considered a possible forerunner of flowering plants.
You can't visit the Cycad National Monument, however. By the Fifties, visitors had stripped the park clean of the fossils. On September 1, 1957, the Cycad Monument was removed from the park system.
The next time you are in a national park, overcome your temptation to pocket a souvenir. Buy some postcards at the visitors' center. (And if you are a meth tweaker cutting burls off redwoods in the Redwoods National Park for sale to China, I hope you accidentally slip with your power saw and cut off your goddam hand.)
(Information on the Cycad Monument is taken from the spring 2014 issue of National Parks magazine. The opinion on people who are stealing and selling burls for coffee tables is my own.)
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