Visitors are encouraged to dig up history at the Fossil and Prairie Center near Rockford in Floyd County.Long before Iowa was settled by pioneers and transformed into the agricultural powerhouse it is today, the state’s landscape was very different. In fact, with a little bit of exploration, it’s not that hard to go back to a time period millions of years ago when Iowa was actually part of an inland sea.

Evidence shows Iowa spent more than half of the last 600 million years at the bottom of an ocean. But even though this beachfront property may have disappeared millions of years ago, there are actually a number of ways you can still reconnect with the state’s prehistoric past. All it takes is a willingness to explore and an eye for details.

Finding fossils isn’t all that difficult, especially if you understand (and accept) that it’s rarely, if ever, about digging up dinosaur bones. For most,...