The bones turned up at a dizzying pace. Every day yielded more and more fossils; each discovery offered new insights into the ancient history of an isolated corner of western Colorado, a place that’s now known as the mastodon capital of the world.
Mason Olivier tries to plays with an interactive exhibit, February 25 at the Denver Museaum of Nature and Science. The “Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age” exhibit currently on display offers an ambitious look at Ice Age creatures that roamed all corners of the earth for hundreds of thousands of years. The traveling exhibition kicked off at the Field Museum in Chicago, and it features life-sized models of massive mammoths and mastodons that lived in North America millions of years ago. The exhibit also includes sections devoted to Ice Age fossils uncovered in 2010 at Snowmass Village in Colorado. The show runs until May 27 at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, 2001 Colorado Blvd. (Marla R. Keown/Aurora Sentinel)
Don Brandbor escavates a Stegomastadone fossil, Feb. 25 at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The “Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age” exhibit currently on display offers an ambitious look at Ice Age creatures that roamed all corners of the earth for hundreds of thousands of years. The traveling exhibition kicked off at the Field Museum in Chicago, and it features life-sized models of massive mammoths and mastodons that lived in North America millions of years ago. The exhibit also includes sections devoted to Ice Age fossils uncovered in 2010 at Snowmass Village in Colorado. The show runs until May 27 at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, 2001 Colorado Blvd. (Marla R. Keown/Aurora Sentinel)
Don Brandbor excitedly escavates a Stegomastadone fossil, Feb. 25 at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The “Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age” exhibit currently on display offers an ambitious look at Ice Age creatures that roamed all corners of the earth for hundreds of thousands of years. The traveling exhibition kicked off at the Field Museum in Chicago, and it features life-sized models of massive mammoths and mastodons that lived in North America millions of years ago. The exhibit also includes sections devoted to Ice Age fossils uncovered in 2010 at Snowmass Village in Colorado. The show runs until May 27 at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, 2001 Colorado Blvd. (Marla R. Keown/Aurora Sentinel)
Beryl Brooks looks at a display Feb. 25 at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The “Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age” exhibit currently on display offers an ambitious look at Ice Age creatures that roamed all corners of the earth for hundreds of thousands of years. The traveling exhibition kicked off at the Field Museum in Chicago, and it features life-sized models of massive mammoths and mastodons that lived in North America millions of years ago. The exhibit also includes sections devoted to Ice Age fossils uncovered in 2010 at Snowmass Village in Colorado. The show runs until May 27 at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, 2001 Colorado Blvd. (Marla R. Keown/Aurora Sentinel)
Michael Olivier watches a video Feb. 25 at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The “Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age” exhibit currently on display offers an ambitious look at Ice Age creatures that roamed all corners of the earth for hundreds of thousands of years. The traveling exhibition kicked off at the Field Museum in Chicago, and it features life-sized models of massive mammoths and mastodons that lived in North America millions of years ago. The exhibit also includes sections devoted to Ice Age fossils uncovered in 2010 at Snowmass Village in Colorado. The show runs until May 27 at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, 2001 Colorado Blvd. (Marla R. Keown/Aurora Sentinel)
Mason Olivier, 4 years old, checks out a replica of a short-faced bear tooth February 25 at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The “Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age” exhibit currently on display offers an ambitious look at Ice Age creatures that roamed all corners of the earth for hundreds of thousands of years. The traveling exhibition kicked off at the Field Museum in Chicago, and it features life-sized models of massive mammoths and mastodons that lived in North America millions of years ago. The exhibit also includes sections devoted to Ice Age fossils uncovered in 2010 at Snowmass Village in Colorado. The show runs until May 27 at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, 2001 Colorado Blvd. (Marla R. Keown/Aurora Sentinel)
A Columbian mammoth display fills the room, Feb. 25 at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The “Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age” exhibit currently on display offers an ambitious look at Ice Age creatures that roamed all corners of the earth for hundreds of thousands of years. The traveling exhibition kicked off at the Field Museum in Chicago, and it features life-sized models of massive mammoths and mastodons that lived in North America millions of years ago. The exhibit also includes sections devoted to Ice Age fossils uncovered in 2010 at Snowmass Village in Colorado. The show runs until May 27 at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, 2001 Colorado Blvd. (Marla R. Keown/Aurora Sentinel)
Mason (center left) and Kenzie Olivier (center right) check out the “Lyuba” woolly mammoth replica Feb. 25 at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The “Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age” exhibit currently on display offers an ambitious look at Ice Age creatures that roamed all corners of the earth for hundreds of thousands of years. The traveling exhibition kicked off at the Field Museum in Chicago, and it features life-sized models of massive mammoths and mastodons that lived in North America millions of years ago. The exhibit also includes sections devoted to Ice Age fossils uncovered in 2010 at Snowmass Village in Colorado. The show runs until May 27 at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, 2001 Colorado Blvd. (Marla R. Keown/Aurora Sentinel)
“Fossils were popping up everywhere. It was muddy, it was wet and it was cold, but it was filled with so much excitement,” said Samantha Richards, an educator at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science who was on site at Snowmass Village soon after the first bones turned up in October 2010. “The excitement came from the discovery of all the new things that we didn’t know existed here. The science was happening so rapidly.”
The dig, officially coined the “Snowmastodon Project,” turned up remains of prehistoric camels, ground sloths, giant bison and tiger salamanders that called Colorado home 130,000 to 150,000 years ago. But the greatest number of bones from the dig came from mammoths and mastodons, which are featured in the “Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age” exhibit currently on display at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science until May 27.
The traveling exhibition kicked off at the Field Museum in Chicago, and it offers an ambitious look at the creatures that roamed all corners of the earth for hundreds of thousands of years. The exhibit started in the museum in Chicago, but Denver Nature of Science and Museum staff added elements to reflect Colorado’s Ice Age history. One section shows off Columbian mammoth and American mastodon fossils found at the Snowmass Village site. Volunteers at stations around the exhibit floor show off bones of Ice Age creatures found in Colorado, and highlight the differences between mammoths and mastodons (both animals are relatives of the modern African elephant, but their anatomy differed in terms of height, bone structure and teeth). There’s also a display specifically devoted to the Ice Age in Colorado.
“(The exhibit) is tied very closely to Colorado,” said Richards, who spent the months following the Snowmass Village dig showing off fossil at schools in Pitkin County. “Prior to the discovery, there were a handful of mastodon bones found in Colorado. They were pretty scrappy … Snowmass Village is now the mastodon capital of the world,” she said, adding that the 14-feet-tall Columbian mammoth roamed native plains before the onset of the Ice Age.
The 13,000-square-foot exhibition includes impressive fossils and colorful displays about the Ice Age in Colorado. There are life-sized models of massive mammoths and mastodons that lived in North America millions of years
ago. The exhibit features models of the animals’ relatives and contemporaries as well. There’s a lifelike cast of the moeritherium, an extinct, pig-like relative of the mammoth and mastodon that lived 37 to 30 million years ago, as well as imposing figures of giant ice bears and sabertooth cats.
The show even explores the ties between the animals and the earliest humans. An interactive cave exhibit focuses on cave art found in southwestern France that dates back more than 17,000 years. Those cave paintings included depictions of giant woolly mammoths and mastodons, and the exhibit explores the roles the animals played in the lives of our earliest human ancestors.
“It’s really interesting to think of what they mean,” Richards said. “They became a food source for Native Americans in North America. It might be one of the reasons that they went extinct.”
Whether the creatures played a role in humans’ early mythology, or whether they were simply seen as game to be hunted and eaten remains a mystery. But thanks to finds at places such as Snowmass Village, there’s plenty of solid, scientific data about the everyday lives of these animals. In 2007, for example, a reindeer herder in Siberia stumbled upon the intact corpse of a baby mammoth that had fallen into a bog and died. The 42,000-year-old body had been enveloped in permafrost and preserved. For thousands of years, the baby mammoth nicknamed Lyuba had remained perfectly intact.
“It’s the best preserved mammoth that’s ever been discovered,” Richards said. “It has eyelashes and hair. It had remains of its last meal in its guts. It provided a lot of information about the daily habits of these animals.”
The exhibit features a life-sized model of Lyuba, which redefined ideas about an animal that went extinct 10,000 years ago, when temperatures cooled dramatically and the Ice Age took hold in earnest.
Lyuba gave scientists new insights into these extinct animals, as did the trove of fossils uncovered by Denver Museum of Nature and Science staff in 2010. The dig lasted less than nine months, but it yielded more than 4,800 bones from 26 different Ice Age species. The discoveries offered a local tie to the prehistoric, Ice Age titans featured in the exhibit.
“When I took the bones out to the schools, they were days out of the ground,” Richards said. “I was putting them in the back of my car and driving them out to local schools. It’s something that I’ll probably never get to do again in my life.”
“Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age”
Runs until May 27 at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, 2001 Colorado Blvd.
For more information, log on to www.dmns.org/mammoths.
Reach reporter Adam Goldstein at agoldstein@aurorasentinel.com or 720-449-9707
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