Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
EARTHWATCH INSTITUTE
uncover the ice age
HOT SPRINGS, SOUTH DAKOTA
Macrauchenia No. 1: Well, why don't they call it The Big Chill? Or The
Nippy Era? I'm just sayin', how do we know it's an Ice Age? Mac-
rauchenia No. 2: Because…of all the ice.
—From the movie
Ice Age
41 |
About 26,000 years ago, a large group of teenage mammoths, faced with the choice
of sweeping off new snowfall to eat last year's dead grass or going for the green vegetation
around a thermal pond, decided to go for the “salad bar.” Unfortunately for them, they
stumbled over the edge of the sinkhole at the pond and got trapped in the muddy bottom. Even-
tually, the deadly sinkhole filled in, preserving at least a hundred unlucky dead mammoths.
For millennia, their graves went unmarked.
In 1974, when a bulldozer was leveling a hill for a planned housing development, it sliced
through what looked like a tusk. The operator of the bulldozer showed the tusk and other bones
to his son, who invited his former geology professor, Dr. Larry Agenbroad, to take a look. At
first, Agenbroad thought it was a mammoth kill, a site where hunters took down some much
needed meat, but radiocarbon dating of the bones ruled out that theory. It seems that the mam-
moths died long before humans arrived in North America 15,000 years ago.
The Columbian mammoths, like their better known cousins the woolly mammoths, in-
habited North America for well over a million years before dying out about 11,000 years ago.
Taller and heavier than the woollies, typically standing 13 feet high at the shoulder and weigh-
ing nine tons, they looked like an overgrown version of today's Asian elephants.
The owner of the land, Phil Anderson, postponed the housing project and gave Agenbroad
three years to explore the hill. The following summer, Agenbroad spent the only grant money
he could secure, $500, to feed his students as they began the site's inaugural excavation. A
year later, he began his association with Earthwatch (see sidebar p. 94). When it became clear
that the little town at the southern tip of the Black Hills possessed an enormous mammoth
