Paleontologists from UNLV 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 UNLV geology professor emeritus Steve Rowland, who also works at the Las Vegas Natural History Museum. Many UNLV students and community volunteers assisted with the excavation. The paper, co-authored by UNLV 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,” says Rowland. “Ash 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.”
UNLV 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 UNLV Foundation. UNLV 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 ‘Dane’ naming it after their young son.
Under permit from the Bureau of Land Management, the team excavated portions of the mammoth’s 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, “This has been a fantastically interesting project that allowed many UNLV 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.
