In my dissertation, I study the history of fossil collecting on Indigenous land in the nineteenth-century United States. Working at the intersection of history of science, environmental history, and Indigenous history, I investigate fossils as a key site of contest in a century defined by battles over land, knowledge, and belonging. From before contact to the present moment, Indigenous people have exercised their control over fossils presently or previously buried in their homelands. Throughout the nineteenth century, white Americans from homesteaders to members of geological surveys to museum-funded paleontologists collected fossils and removed them from the land. A central part of natural history collections and national parks from their inception to today, fossils play a crucial role in histories of science. Studying the relationship between fossil collecting, Indigenous knowledge, and Indigenous dispossession, I make a key intervention in histories of paleontology, natural history collecting, and the formation of national parks.