Posted on 11/23/2010 9:21:20 AM PST by Squidpup
An accidental discovery by a bulldozer driver has led to what may be the find of the century: an ice-age burial ground that could rival the famed La Brea tar pits.
After two weeks of excavating ancient fossils at the Ziegler Reservoir near Snowmass Village, Colorado, scientists from the Denver Museum of Natural Science returned home Wednesday with their unearthed treasures in tow -- a wide array of fossils, insects and plant life that they say give a stunningly realistic view of what life was like when ancient, giant beasts lumbered across the Earth.
Since the team’s arrival in mid-October, scientists have extracted nearly 600 bones from about 20 different animals from the Pleistocene era, a period of time during the Ice Age. The remains of up to six different species have been exhumed, including five American mastodons, three Ice Age bison, a Jefferson’s ground sloth, a mule deer, a tiger salamander, and two Columbian mammoths.
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The site rivals many others in terms of its diversity, as it is the only known place in Colorado -- and one of few in North America -- that contains both mammoth and mastodon fossils in the same location. And just finding an American mastodon is pretty unusual in itself.
"There are only three known records of mastodons in Colorado, and we have found at least five specimens," Miller said. "So throughout the course of 120 years of paleontology, we jumped from three mastodons to eight in a single two-week period."
And the significance of the Snowmass Excavation doesn’t stop there. Snowmass has also produced an array of insect and plant life, as well as wood that has been chewed by beavers, essentially producing what Miller calls a "window into an Ice Age ecosystem."
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(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
interesting
Very interesting for me, my cousins donated this land.
Cool stuff.
The mastodons they found in Russia in ice several years back had enough tissue left they were talking about doing some sort of Jurrasic Park creation with a modern day elephant...or something to that affect.
Anyone know more information regarding this? They seemed very serious about it at the time but sure how viable it is.
Helen Thomas’ birthplace?
Neato to be the one finding something like this.
so... what was the difference between a Mammoth and a Mastodon again??
Well, that construction project is now in permanent limbo.
Quick, check the old family homestead papers!
Woolly Mammoth = hair and bigger.
Mastodon = no hair and not as mammoth. ;)
Wiki sez: Mastodons or Mastodonts (meaning "nipple-teeth") are members of the extinct genus Mammut of the order Proboscidea and form the family Mammutidae; they resembled, but were distinct from, the woolly mammoth which belongs to the family Elephantidae. Mastodons were browsers and mammoths were grazers.
Mammoth.
Mastodon.
Can the mastadons open a casino yet?
That kind of sounds like a joke. Thanks Wiki.
lol
I'm half browser on my mother's side...
I switched from grazer to browser back in the Mosaic days.
Make that “... in the Mosaic Era.”
A possible reason. A glacial lake might have substantial glacial silt surrounding it, and that kind of silt can be deadly dangerous to walk on.
The most dangerous kind of glacial silt is in a tidewater area, as it seems solid to walk on, but when the tide comes in, it comes in underneath you. Suddenly the ground turns to sandy chocolate pudding and you drop down several feet. You are held there with incredible suction as the water continues to come in, and you drown. There is a lot of it around Anchorage, Alaska, and they have to give out warnings at frequent intervals not to walk on the silt.
But in this case, with no tide, it could be like sand bars, some of which are solid, and some are not. And you only have to hit a bad one once. It is unlikely that even a mastodon could escape from that.
It would be very deceptive, because birds and light animals might be able to cross over it easily.
From Earth in Upheaval by Immanual Velikovsky:
In 1797 the body of a mammoth, with flesh skin, and hair was found in northeastern Siberia, and since then bodies of other mammoths have been unearthed from the frozen ground in various parts of that region. The flesh had the appearance of freshly frozen beef; it was edible, and the wolves and sledge dogs fed on it without harm. [footnote references an observation of D.F.Hertz in B Digby: The Mammoth (1926), p.9.]Really what is more interesting is the inference Velikovsky makes from this which is that the mammoths must have been entombed and frozen almost instantly, else they would have rotted. Full text is available at Amazon. (This link takes you to page 19 where the extract I presented appears at the bottom of the page.)
ML/NJ
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