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| Researchers from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and a team of student assistants unearth fossils near Villa Grove [Credit: Matt Hildner] |
"This is basically about 40-feet deep in the earth and you don't get a chance to look down that deep very often," said Steve Holen, curator of archaeology at the museum.
The digging for those initial fragments have led them to find bones belonging to two Columbian mammoths, a camel, a ground squirrel, a burrowing rodent and two different species of snails.
Thursday a team of student assistants helped the researchers excavate one set of mammoth bones whose teeth indicate that it died as a juvenile.
Holen said the remains were too fragmented to determine the exact size of the animal but estimated it would have stood about 7 feet tall at the time of its death.
Its adult counterparts could grow as tall as 13 feet and weigh as much as 10 tons.
While a mammoth discovery in the San Luis Valley was not surprising to the researchers, the excavation of the 25,000-year-old remains will shed light on what the area was like at the time.
Holen said the mammoth died during a warm period before the last great glaciers would expand to cover large swaths of the continent.
The mammoths here would have found a landscape far different from the chico brush and short, bunchy grass lining the valley floor today.
Instead, they would have trod a medium- or tall-grass prairie, appropriate for a species that could eat hundreds of pounds of grass per day.
While Holen said the area might not have had much more rainfall than today, but the moisture lasted because it didn't evaporate as quickly.
But it is the smallest of the discoveries at the site — the remains of the two snails — that could hold the most insight for the era's climate.
"They'll tell us a lot about what the climate was like at that time," Holen said. "They were very sensitive to climate change."
The researchers also are waiting on an analysis of pollen from the site to determine how heavily forested the area was or whether it was predominately grassland.
Adams State College, who had two students on the dig, also is conducting a geomorphology study to determine more about the material in which the bones were found.
"We're going to learn a lot about this period," Holen said.
While mammoths were common to the continent in the late Pleistocene Era, so were camels.
Roughly a football field away, the researchers excavated a camel's toe, building on the vertebra found by the bulldozer operator in March.
Both species would have ceased to exist in the region roughly 12,000 years ago.
Richard Stucky, curator of paleoecology and evolution at the museum, said the camel, whose remains tumbled down the prehistoric wash and were deposited in the gravel pit, would be similar to the ones seen in Africa and the Middle East today.
"They're not that much different," he said.
The gravel pit sits on land under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
Harley Armstrong, a paleontologist for the agency who was on hand Thursday, said he's looking forward to a report and possibly a publication from what the museum researchers find at the site.
The museum team will wrap up their work at the site today, but whether more excavation is done in the future remains to be determined.
Author: Matt Hildner | Source: The Pueblo Chieftan [July 15, 2011]