(HOST) If you enjoyed the movies Ice Age and Ice Age: the Meltdown, commentator Ted Levin says you won’t want to miss the new exhibit at the Montshire.
(LEVIN) In 1974, in the southwest corner of South Dakota, in the town of Hot Springs, an excavator was grading a small mound for a housing development when he unearthed an Ice Age mausoleum.
Thus far, the fossil skeletons of fifty-one Columbian mammoths, have been recovered from the remnants of a 26,000 year-old sinkhole and there may be at least a hundred more still buried in the shale.
The Pleistocene pachyderm stood fourteen-feet high at the shoulder, the largest elephant the world has ever known.
The sink was seventy-feet deep. During a brief seven hundred year window (a mere blink in the geologic timescale), a parade of wayward, teenage male mammoths, driven by testosterone and who knows what else, left the security of their respective matriarchal bands – it’s believed that mammoths maintained the very same social hierarchies as our two species of surviving elephants.
They blundered into the unforgiving depths of the sinkhole. Steep banks and mud like grease kept the animals from climbing out. I can well imagine the high plains echoing with the bugle cries of desperate mammoths.
But sinkholes are not confined exclusively to South Dakota. Florida is also pock-marked with Ice Age sinkholes and caves that hold the remains of Columbian mammoths, as well as American mastodons, and an assortment of other prehistoric mammals.
These include tapirs, short-faced bears, dire wolves, long-horned bison, llamas, ground sloths, capybaras, giant armadillos called glyptodonts, and beaver as big as black bears.
A traveling exhibit on Ice Age elephants, developed by the Florida State Museum of Natural History is currently at the Montshire Museum of Science.
The exhibit displays eighty fossils, colorful interpretive murals, photographs, and videos, including a twenty-minute film on the Hot Springs Mammoth Site.
My favorite fossil is Amebelodon britti, the shoveltusker, a seven-million-year-old pachyderm with long, spatulate lower incisors that resemble a pair of short, ivory snowboards. Shoveltuskers belong to a group of extinct proboscideans called gomphotheres, who died out, at least in Florida, before the rise of mammoths and mastodons.
Paleolithic hunters, who were called Clovis people because their obsidian arrows and spear points were first found near Clovis, New Mexico, must have had their hands full with lions and saber tooth tigers and bears.
Oh my.
Ice Age black bears were bigger than today’s pedestrian models, plus there were grizzlies, and short-faced bears that stood nearly five-and-a-half feet high at the shoulder, were nearly ten-feet long, weighed 1,500 pounds, and were built to run.
The exhibit also features the 15,000 year-old skull of an American lion, Panthara atrox. The skull is the color and shape of a Thanksgiving turkey, and the cat had to be one of the largest ever to roam the planet — big enough, apparently, to take on a mammoth.
Ted Levin is a writer and photographer and winner of the 2004 Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing.