![]() About 26,000 years ago, Agenbroad says, a sinkhole formed here and filled with water from a hot spring, creating a vegetated oasis that lured many young mammoths to their death. This is one of the world’s largest sites that display the bones where mammoths died, and it has some of the horror and fascination of a slow-motion traffic pileup. Larry Agenbroad, the paleontologist who helped discover this site 35 years ago, figures at least as many remain hidden underground. Altogether, parts of 58 mammoths lie exposed in an area about the size of a hockey rink, sheltered beneath a roof built to protect them. She’s got a big shoulder blade sticking up out of the ground off her knees, the round end of a leg bone at her right elbow, ribs like stripes painted in the dirt wall just above, and behind her a sort of cascade of half-excavated skulls and tusks spilling down to the bottom of the dig. With them, a mammoth ate 400 pounds of grasses and sedges a day.ĭirectly below the sidewalk, a volunteer scratches up dirt in a niche formed largely by the bones of dead mammoths. She points out a set of brick-size teeth with corrugated surfaces like the soles of running shoes. That’s as much as a school bus,” a guide tells the tourists on a sidewalk at the Mammoth Site, a paleontological dig and museum in the town of Hot Springs. They were like African elephants, only bigger. It’s a geologic echo of the great herds of Columbian mammoths that used to wander here. In the blue shadows after dawn, the low hills in this stretch of South Dakota can look like a line of elephants trudging toward some distant water hole. ![]()
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