Latest news with #Megalonyx
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Giant Ground Sloth tooth found during Lubbock road project
The remains of an Ice Age era animal have been unearthed in Lubbock during the ongoing road construction project for Loop 88. Due to Texas having locations where ancient human activity connected to megafauna, TxDOT decided to take a closer look at the Loop 88 project, according to a news release from the Texas Department of Transportation. The excavation near Loop 88 has already dug up a giant find — the tooth of a Giant Ground Sloth. 'We know we've found Giant Ground Sloth by its distinctive tooth,' said Chris Ringstaff, project planner with TxDOT's environmental affairs division. 'We're here to get the road built. But who doesn't love digging up big ol' animals?' The remains were found during a TxDOT-contracted archeological survey, with the excavation from Jan. 27, 2025 – Feb. 5, 2025. The bones appeared to be from large, prehistoric animals that were once common in the area during the Pleistocene Epoch. This time period is known as the Ice Age, which ended 11,700 years ago. "We know we found the giant ground sloth by the distinctive tooth that was discovered," said Jason Britsch, Amarillo Public Information Officer for TxDOT. "Now, whether all the bones are giant ground sloth, or there are some different animals, like mammoth or mastodon, we're not sure yet. But paleontologists will give us positive identification, so tests are still ongoing to see what all is in there. Further information could still be discovered." TxDOT is in contact with the Museum of Texas Tech, which is assisting in the preparation, housing and identification of the bones. "Texas has a lot of rich sediments with fossils," said Dr. Aaron Pan, executive director of the Museum of Texas Tech. "It is common to find fossils during building or road constructions in Texas, especially in the metroplex." This article continues after the gallery. There are two types of Giant Ground Sloths: the Nothrotheriops shastensis, known as the Shasta Ground Sloth, and the Megalonyx, or Large Clawed Ground Sloth, according to the National Park Service. Shastas were around 9 feet long and weighed 550 pounds, whereas the Megalonyx were about 10 feet long and weighed 2,200 pounds. Pan confirmed the sloth was likely a Shasta Ground Sloth. Evidence of these sloths are found throughout the southwest. Adventure awaits: Lubbock Lake Landmark offers archaeological digs, look into where city started If evidence of human-megafauna activity is found at the site, it will be a first for a TxDOT project, according to the release. 'If the site involves humans, we have to address road construction impacts under state and federal law,' Ringstaff said. 'If the site has no artifacts and dates to a time well before humans, TxDOT will recommend no further work, and the project can proceed to construction.' If further excavation is required, it is not expected to impact the Loop 88 project's timeline, according to the release. "It's still early on in the project phase, to where it will not impact construction," Britsch said. "This portion of it is still several years down the road, so it's not impacting the construction timeline." Is it legal to own a mammoth tusk? Here's what to know about the once common Texas giant This isn't the first discovery of an ancient animal in West Texas this year. In March, a mammoth tusk was found on a ranch in far West Texas and is in the care of Sul Ross State University. 'We live in an amazing region that has great discoveries found all the time,' Pan said. 'It's not unusual, but it is always fantastic.' The Museum of Texas Tech, 3301 4th St., has many of these discoveries on display, from Ice Age Colombian Mammoths to creatures named after Texas Tech (Technosaurus). Attendees could learn more about what ancient creatures once walked, or swam, the area, along with seeing exhibits on anthropology, art, clothing and textiles, history, natural sciences and paleontology. Behind-the-scenes: Museum of Texas Tech gives behind scenes tour of Paleontology, dinosaurs, Antarctic items The Museum of Texas Tech is a massive, free-to-visit museum, and is open to all. People can keep up with the museum at Facebook and Instagram. Alana Edgin writes about business, and occasionally historic discoveries, for the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. Got a news tip? Contact her via email at aedgin@ This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Giant Ground Sloth tooth found during Lubbock Loop 88 project
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Volunteers dig for mammoth and ancient camel bones in the California desert. You can, too
Twenty-thousand years ago or so, a wounded male mammoth lay down in ancient California savannah and died. About 30 years old, not fully grown, one of its 15-foot-long tusks had been dealt a mighty thwack, likely by a bigger mammoth in a battle for mating supremacy, and some of its teeth dislodged. Death might not have come quickly. "You can't absolutely say that's what happened, but I would say that would hurt a lot, and it might not have been be able to eat," says Sandra Keeley, an Anza Borrego Desert State Park volunteer. Keeley and her husband Robert found the mammoth in what is now the California desert north of Interstate 8 in 2010, and helped painstakingly excavate its remains. Inch by inch over three winters, they and other volunteers carefully dug through silty sand, engineered a homemade truss and lifted and hauled out its weighty body and head. Today, its skull sits atop a heavy but moveable platform at the Stout Research Center, around back from the state park headquarters in Borrego Springs. Flipped over for easier access, the work of carefully preserving it goes on. One room over, the weighty tusk of another mammoth curls along the top of file cabinets. The mammoth remains are the largest of approximately 33,000 vertebrate, invertebrate and plant species found in a vast desert landscape west of the Salton Sea and south to Mexico, now precisely catalogued and crammed into or on top of the Stout center's drawers and shelves. This is no natural history museum, with re-created or augmented skeletons mounted on stands with easy to digest labels. It is a true research center. From huge, lanky Megalonyx sloth remnants and extinct bear and camel species bones to fossilized tree roots, ferns and even pollen, the oldest specimen is likely about 10 million year old. There are Imperial walrus, sand dollars and coral bits, and ancient badger teeth and raccoon claws. The collection is believed to contain fragments of the longest continuous record of life on the continent, spanning more than 5 million years, and they've dug up individual pieces that could go back 10 million years. And you can joint the hunt for more puzzle pieces in the timeline if you want. If you've ever dreamed of ditching the tour line at Los Angeles' La Brea Tar Pits and Museum and doing your own field work, this is the place. Intensive paleontology training is offered for free each winter and spring, typically from November through April — and then you're expected to do 40 to 120 hours of volunteer work a year once you're qualified. It's also the only way currently to get inside the facility: The center's occasional public tours were suspended during COVID, and when the parks interpreter who led them retired, they were discontinued. Volunteers are the life blood animating the dusty, hot work of finding, removing, protecting and cataloging such an astonishingly long record of life. "They are 95% important to everything we do here. They do everything," said Lyn Murray, the California parks district paleontologist overseeing the facility, With a paid staff that consists of a park aide and two interns, Murray depends on the volunteers. "They do all the surveys, they collect all the fossils, they prepare all the fossils, identify all the fossils, label all the fossils, they put them all in the database and and then beyond that, they do the data management, they do the photography and analyzing and processing, too." Most of the approximately 60 active volunteers are retirees from Borrego Springs and the Coachella Valley — shout-out to Palm Desert, home to several — or snowbird residents from Canada or other colder climes who spend winters here. "I love it, everything about it," said Marsha Boring, 72, a retired nurse from Virginia who first signed up when she moved to Borrego Springs. " I thought, 'Well, you know, I'll meet some nice people,' which I did. But it turned out I loved it. I love going out in the field. I love working in the lab. I really like working with the students." Boring now coordinates all the volunteers and their training, atop other duties. She and others translate skills from previous lives in their efforts here. Linda Gilbert, 73, a retired Bank of America senior vice president who oversaw data processing there, has been a volunteer here since 2007. Most recently she designed and now coordinates a comprehensive online database of the research center's holdings. On a recent Monday, a snowbird from Springfield, Vermont, was making additional entries, taking photos of a small fossil from every conceivable angle — sometimes 100 are taken of a specimen, Gilbert said — and uploading them online. The database has restricted access, but researchers regularly contact the Stout center for information. The online records combined with newer tools like GIS and others developed in the past decade allow volunteers and academics to do smarter modelling of where exactly valuable fossils may be located. Using photogrammetry software, they can virtually stitch together overlapping photos to create 3-D models of fossils and their environs. In some cases, heavy, hard to move sets of bones or animal tracks are also now left in place and photographed extensively instead. "Instead of looking at (data) as lines and columns on a spreadsheet, now we can look at it in 3D on a map, and we can see distributions," says Gilbert. "We can use spatial analytical models that tell us where the specimen is located to look at concentrations of different types of fossils." The volunteers have a giant area to search. More than 100,000 acres of permanently protected "badlands" that are prime areas for fossil hunting unfurl across slopes and valleys in the 650,000-acre Anza Borrego park, explains veteran volunteer Bob Keeley. Badlands are silty areas where stagecoach and covered wagon wheels often got stuck, hence the name, says Murray. Geologically, the eroding desert sits atop major earthquake faults, and as the tectonic plates "unzip," says Murray, the looser silt, bones and other material fall into cracks and gullies. In one spot in the park, west of Font's Point, silt as old as 10 million years stretches down underground nearly 3 miles. That's three and half times the depth of the Grand Canyon, notes Keeley, and every major layer offers a window into a different era. Much of the gritty badlands and fossils were deposited here when the ancient Colorado River changed course and flowed northward at various points between three million years ago and the 1700s. But before that, saltier waters pushed north. Father Pedro Font, chaplain for Captain Juan Bautista de Anza's 1775 expedition from Mexico across the Southern California desert, recorded in his diary seeing piles of mussels and sea snail shells 'so old and ancient that they easily crumble on pressing them with the fingers. I have come to surmise that in the olden times the sea spread over all this land, and that in some of the great recessions which the histories tell us about, it left these salty and sandy wastes uncovered.'Others traveling the Colorado desert in the 1800s noted the area's coquinas — limestone composed of shells and fragments — and extensive invertebrate fossils. Gradually they created a timeline stretching back as long as 10 million years, with a marine period from about 6 to 4 million years ago, when ancient ocean waters reached north to here, then gradually receded. On the trail: Come along on a journey in search of the mythical lost ship of the desert In the early 1970s, George Miller became Professor of Geology and Paleontology at Imperial Valley College, a prime position to discover and study fossils. In 1974, he met Betty Stout, a knowledgeable volunteer aide and naturalist, and with her help began teaching the first paleontology classes in Borrego Springs. "With these new, trained volunteers, Miller led the next big wave of productive paleontology surveying and collecting through the 1980s," per the Anza Borrego Desert Paleontology Society. With funds donated by Betty Stout and her successful publisher husband, Charles, the Stout Paleontology Laboratory was completed in 1982. The small structure gave volunteers a place to restore and curate the majority of the fossils collected in the park.Miller's most acclaimed discovery occurred in December 1986, when he and his team unearthed a mammoth skull, tusk and remains that was the most complete skeleton of Mammoth meridionalis (southern mammoth) in North America. In 1988 the 'Miller Mammoth' skull and tusk were airlifted by helicopter to the Stout laboratory. Nearly a quarter century later, the Keeleys, Gilbert and others made their mammoth find. Apart from most of the bones, they found a tibia and a femur bone laying at right angles above where the mammoth lay. The edges of the two bones were curved. That typically happens when a human uses a tool to break a joint off of in a freshly deceased animal, not thousands of years later. Debate still rages in 2025 among paleontologists and archeologists, but the mammoth bones the Keeleys and fellow volunteers found 15 years ago are a tantalizing clue showing humans might have lived and hunted much earlier than 8,000 years ago in North America, as some researchers still think. Today, volunteers typically meet at 8 a.m. on a weekday in Borrego Springs and head out armed with picks, shovels and maps and warnings of risks, including numerous types of rattlesnakes, nasty scorpions and blinding heat. They carefully scour gulches and slopes for telltale bits — perhaps a petrified tooth or a hunk of a leg bone sticking through. Murray and others don't give specific locations to ward off private, illegal collectors and overly zealous social media mavens who could wreak havoc. The most common finds are remnants of ancient horses who roamed North America until about 10,000 years ago, when they and other large mammals went extinct as the ice ages set in. Once old bones are carefully extricated, typically from highly calcified sand — more like concrete — that is holding it, the piece or pieces are brought back to the Stout lab. There they are spread out on aluminum foil laid in plaster strip beds on tables, explains volunteer Lloyd George Abrams. Tiny jackhammers and toothbrushes, acetone and epoxy are a few of the tools used to gradually, carefully separate and protect the fossil from whatever is encasing it. Then it is identified with the help of experts, catalogued, and stored in the collections room next door. Some of the rarest finds in the Stout collection are not large, but they are remarkable. "This is our 'gee whiz' cabinet," says Murray, opening a drawer filled with small boxes. He picks up a small, triangular piece. It is a "terror bird" beak, from an 8-foot tall predatory bird, about 3.5 million years old. These were the apex predators in South America that lived during the Eocene to the late Pleistocene era, roughly 43 million to about half a million years ago. They were previously thought to have migrated as far north as Florida, but the 3.5 million-year-old beak in the California desert opened up a new horizontal band of ancient life stretching from Florida across Texas into the Colorado desert, Murray says. Present day animals help guide the past. Children's tiny rubber and plastic toy elephants offer quick reference points for what goes where on the mammoth finds. When a mountain lion died in the park, a volunteer taught himself taxidermy, and the female cat's fully assembled skeleton now prowls atop the front file cabinets in the collections area. It helps volunteers understand the skeletal make-up of distant ancestors that roamed nearby. Asked about the decay of exposed fossils before they can be catalogued, Murray isn't too worried. Not only are there 100,000 acres of potential remains stretching for miles beneath the earth, they're in the largest state park south of Alaska, with laws against commercial collecting or construction. "We're protected from development, so there will be minimum parking lots or buildings on top of the fossil beds, and it is protected from pilferage and other impacts of people who are looking to benefit financially from the fossils," says Murray. "So the potential for the future fossil research and study here is excellent. It goes on. And we are always interested in new volunteers." Interested in training to become a volunteer paleontologist? All-day classes are held on Fridays from November through April at the Stout Research Center in Borrego Springs. For information, email Janet Wilson is senior environment reporter for The Desert Sun and co-authors USA Today Climate Point. She can be reached at jwilson@ This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Mammoth remains near Salton Sea
