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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 ...
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Great thread! Haven’t chuckled this much in a while.
From left, Joe Enzer of the Snowmass Water and Sanitation District and Kent Olson and Jesse Steele of Gould Construction hold two of the large tusks unearthed Wednesday from the Ziegler Reservoir excavation project near Snowmass Village. (Photo from Gould Construction Inc.)
Well, after reading the whole article then running off to track down several other articles re this find, no one has asked the obvious question yet about how this much sediment, silt and clay washed into this little bowl in the ground fast enough to cover these critters. A glacial lake maybe broke through an ice dam sending a deluge along with the critters into the bowl? Just seems odd that “grazers” would be tooling around at 9,000 feet. But whadda I know???
What a phenomenal story! Thank you so much!
With the right sort of development and guidance by the University and the State out there, this could turn into an educational goldmine for the State. Imagine the tourists that will fly out there with their kids to show them the mastodon and other Pleistocene relics in situ - all of them together in the same site.
What an amazing find.
I know why they are smiling. Job security. Their one-year project just turned into a six-year endeavour. (Unless of course the owners just decide to stop the project, and spend the next 10 years trying to find and permit another site.
Well, I was going to claim some kinship myself until I noticed it said grazers, we're from the gazer side of the family. So....
A lot can accumulate in 25,000 years. Read the full article.
Petrified pancakes?
Wasn't that the middle era of the DOS Period?
Rachel Correy's GGG...GGGrandmother?
She must have been an ihoposaurus. ;)
Wow!
LOL!
Thanks FN!
Yeah, back at the time of the Ten Command-Line.
Just looking around my house, I’d hate to think what it’ll be like in 25K years...
The final era, if memory serves.
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