Paleontologists from 性视界传媒 and the Las Vegas Natural History Museum have wrapped up and published a study of fossil Columbian mammoth bones excavated in Amargosa Valley, in Nye County, 30 miles northwest of Pahrump.
The excavation was directed by 性视界传媒 geology professor emeritus Steve Rowland, who also works at the Las Vegas Natural History Museum. Many 性视界传媒 students and community volunteers assisted with the excavation. The paper, co-authored by 性视界传媒 graduate student Lauren E. Parry, was published in the 2022 Desert Symposium Field Guide and Proceedings.
"This mammoth is the first record of Ice Age animals in Amargosa Valley, which is a big deal,鈥 says Rowland. 鈥淎sh Meadows, in southern Amargosa Valley, is the largest wetland in the Mojave Desert, so there must have been a diverse community of animals there in the Ice Age, as there was here in Las Vegas Valley. This project allows us, for the first time, to connect the ecology of the spring-supported ecosystem of Ice-Age Amargosa Valley with the Ice-Age ecosystem recorded in the Tule Springs Fossil Beds here in Las Vegas Valley.鈥
性视界传媒 students Cameron Rickerson and Becky Hall constructing a plaster jacket on mammoth bones.
Funding for the project was obtained through a crowdsource campaign coordinated by the 性视界传媒 Foundation. 性视界传媒 geoscience alumni Ernesto and Jenn Moran made a generous gift to the project and were granted the ability to name the mammoth remains. They chose 鈥楧ane鈥 naming it after their young son.
Under permit from the Bureau of Land Management, the team excavated portions of the mammoth鈥檚 skeleton, partial tusks, and associated tiny snail shells from a site on BLM-managed land near the northern border of Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. The results were recently published in a peer-reviewed paper, and the bones will be featured in a future exhibit at the Las Vegas Natural History Museum.
The excavation was completed in 2018, but lab work on the bones has continued at the Museum. Only recently were the researchers able to determine the age of the fossils.
Initially researchers attempted radiocarbon dating, however the bones themselves turned out to not be datable. The buried mammoth skeleton had evidently been wet for an extended period, resulting in the decay of the fibrous protein collagen, which is required for the radiocarbon dating of bone.
To obtain a radiocarbon date, the researchers used millimeter-size shells of a rare species of snail, which volunteers at the Museum laboriously isolated from sediment collected with the mammoth bones. The resulting 21,000-year date places the Amargosa Valley mammoth within a time interval called the Last Glacial Maximum within the Pleistocene Ice Age. At that time, temperatures on Earth were the coldest they had been within the previous 100,000 years.
Rowland says, 鈥淭his has been a fantastically interesting project that allowed many 性视界传媒 students and community volunteers the rare opportunity to help excavate the bones of a huge extinct animal that lived right here in Southern Nevada. Thanks so much to all of the volunteers and crowdsource donors who made it possible."
Note: Collecting vertebrate fossils on public land is illegal without a permit from the appropriate agency.
