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.
...snip...
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."
...snip...
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Meh. I switched from browser to wolf back in the masonic days. ;-)
I thought dozers were operated not driven...
lol
I run into all sorts of old stuff when I’m dozing. Also when I have my beer goggles on.
I remember hearing that too.
Seems it would be even more feasible today.
And what could possibly go wrong?
Would be cool though, to recreate an extinct species, even if it was only a close copy.
Maybe they’ll come across a frozen female with some intact eggs one of these days and can fertilize and implant into an elephant as a surrogate to get the ball rolling.
Japs are working on it.
lol. didn’t you also post that 10 minutes ago?
I don’t care how damn old they are. The lift ticket is the same damn price and that’s final.
So not only did Jefferson own and oppress black slaves to his eternal disgrace, he was OWNING AND OPPRESSING GROUND SLOTHS AS WELL! That bastard! How can we honor someone who owned and oppressed ground sloths?
“Find of the Century: Dozer driver discovers Biden’s ossified brain.”
lol.
An untold dark chapter of Jefferson's stroy--his oppression of ground sloths. Of course what may have caused the little guy to flee to Colorado was hearing preachers preach against sloth.
Cool. Reminds me of that old NOrthern Exposure episode where someone fnds a frozen mammoth and the townsfolk eat it before scientists can come to study it. Mammoth burger- yum!
IBTHTP.
...so that ev-va-ree mouth can be fed, oh, the troglodytes...
The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes:
Flood, Fire, and Famine
in the History of Civilization
by Richard Firestone,
Allen West, and
Simon Warwick-Smith
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