Posted on 12/08/2006 8:15:53 PM PST by Dysart
GRAPEVINE — These bones won’t talk — at least not until they’re unearthed again.
Still smarting over the theft of dinosaur footprints this spring, the Army Corps of Engineers and the city of Grapevine have reburied parts of a Columbian mammoth that were found along the receding shore line.
Visitors came across a jawbone and part of a tusk, and there may be more bones in the area, but there are no plans to study the location that is somewhere on 1,200 acres of Corps property under lease to the city, said Dale King, a conservation specialist with the corps. The find was reburied to protect it for the time being.
The bones were discovered in April, but it wasn’t until last month that the find was revealed.
Last spring some dinosaur tracks also were revealed by dropping lake levels. Two of them were stolen soon after their location became known to the public, so neither the city nor the Corps will divulge the location of the latest find out of concern they could be taken, said Doug Evans, Grapevine Parks and Recreation director.
The site is normally covered by water, said Dan McGregor, an archeologist with the Army Corps of Engineers. But two years into a drought, receding lake levels are uncovering archeological sites in area lakes and rivers, McGregor said.
The Corps would like to excavate such sites, but must often just keep them covered until funding can be found, he said. The Corps would like to excavate such sites, but must often just keep them covered until funding can be found, he said.
North Texas was once populated by the Columbian mammoth, said Pamela Owen, senior paleontology educator at the Texas Natural Science Center in Austin. Mammoths and a similar animal present in smaller numbers, mastodons, died out about 10,000 years ago, Owen said. The Columbian mammoth, which stood 10-12 feet high at the shoulder, is thought to have had much less hair than the woolly mammoth commonly depicted in illustrations, she said.
Mammoth finds are common in Texas, said Ron Tykoski, a vertebrate paleontologist with the Museum of of Nature and Science in Dallas. Common theories about why the animals died off are either hunting by humans, rapid climate change, or a combination of both, Tykoski said.
GGG ping
Columbian mammothI think it was just misidentified Panama Red mammoth.
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Maybe it's just me, but I think a certain percentage of these types of finds should be archived, documented as to their location, then left alone.
We don't know what another hundred years of science tech will bring us, and what we might find if we wait.
And I guess it seems sometimes we are a bit timecentric, who says we, in this generation, own all the mummies that can be found in the Valley of the Kings?
Later generations might view us as a little conceited.
A lot of people agree with that, and there has been some movement toward very tiny excavations on some ancient sites. Sometimes that's sort of an accidental result (Mellaart got kicked out of Turkey over something else, and couldn't continue his excavation of Catal Huyuk; although I may have the chronology of events loused up), but work at Pompeii has slowed to nothing, with most of it done in the area of conservation work on already-exposed parts of the site. Also, non-invasive techniques are used to maximize the value of a dig, or to examine mummies and tombs.
But people today study fossils that were dug up years ago because they were preserved in museums. If we put them back, who knows what could happen. Some kid could pick one up and it'll be gone forever.
I did that once. It turned out to be Columbian.
We smoked it anyway.
L
P.S. Lighten up everybody...it's a joke...it was a long time ago back in the 70s..if it happened at all...which I'm not saying it did...and you couldn't prove it anyway.
.....it was a long time ago back in the 70s......
It doesn't really matter to us because we are convinced you didn't inhale any way.
Wonder if they took pictures of the dinosaur footprints before they were stolen?
Only on FR... because this joint is so funny, I'm rolling on the floor.
Dude.
L
For a moment there, thought you said light up everybody.
it was a long time ago back in the 70s..if it happened at all...which I'm not saying it did...and you couldn't prove it anyway.
Can't say I remember the 70s all that well... Guess you had to be there.
On the other hand, how many artifacts and finds can be lost/destroyed in the course of a century? Wouldn't it be better to analyze what we can and do our best to preserve them for later for reanalysis if new methodologies are discovered?
We don't know what another hundred years of science tech will bring us, and what we might find if we wait.
There are lots of mammoth bones found here in the goldfields. No dinosaurs, though.
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