One hundred miles northwest of Las Vegas, in Amargosa Valley, geologists are chipping away at the desert floor, unearthing the remains of a mammoth.
We know a little about the prehistoric giant — it was an adult, for example, and male — but a lot of questions remain.
UNLV professor Steve Rowland is overseeing the excavation. He says the mammoth's story will reveal itself more fully as the dig proceeds.
“We are quite sure it is a Columbian mammoth only because those are the kinds of mammoths we find here,” Rowland said, but that is a question that won't be answered until the entire specimen is out of the ground and studied.
After it is removed, it will become part of the Las Vegas Natural History Museum's permanent collection because it was found on public land managed by the Bureau of Land Management.
Lauren Parry is a Ph.D. student at UNLV working on this project.
“This project is interesting because it kind of gives us a little individual case study on a particular mammoth,” Parry said.
One of the things she'll be studying when the mammoth is out of the ground in the museum will be its tusks. The tusks are like growth rings on a tree and can show environmental stressors.
“One of the cool things about studying mammoths is the cause of their extinction is still under debate there’s lots of different hypotheses that have been put forward,” she said and her hypothesis is there may have been something wrong with mammoth's food supply that made it vulnerable to environmental stress.
Rowland said the fossil's tusks are what makes it a unique find.
“The really unusual thing about this particular skeleton is that the tusks are still intact relative to each other,” he said.
The tusks are sticking straight down into the ground, which he said indicates that the animal was standing up when it died, then it's body floated in a pond before its tusks became stuck straight down.
The animal lived about 20,000 years ago when the Amargosa Valley was wet and green in what was known as the Last Glacial Maximum, which Rowland said is the last time North America was the coldest and wettest it has been in the last 100,000 years.
Other animals that roamed the area included ground sloths, camels, horses, bison, dire wolves, and coyotes.
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Steve Rowland, professor of geology, UNLV; Lauren Parry, Ph.D. student, UNLV