© Heather Rousseau, courtesy Denver Museum of Nature & Science
Dr. Kirk Johnson, chief curator at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, inspects the Ice Age bison skull. Upon inspecting the skull, Johnson said, “I’m trying to think of a cooler fossil that I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Dr. Kirk Johnson, chief curator at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, inspects the Ice Age bison skull. Upon inspecting the skull, Johnson said, “I’m trying to think of a cooler fossil that I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Scientists who study prehistoric remains know they have a huge find at Snowmass, probably the biggest of their careers.
Digging furiously for 18 days last fall as winter closed in, they uncovered the remains of eight to 10 American mastodons, four Columbian mammoths and a Jefferson's ground sloth, the first ever found in Colorado and the highest elevation sample anywhere in North America.
Although a herbivore, the ground sloth was the size of a grizzly bear and "capable of ripping your face off if you got too close to it," said Kirk Johnson, chief curator at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, at a recent press conference.
That's conjectural, as ground sloths and most other species found at the Snowmass site disappeared 10,000 years ago, soon after the last great ice sheets retreated. Other species remain, such as the camel, whose tooth was found at Snowmass. But scientists aren't sure whether the genus of the extinct Camelops, had a hump, as camels today do, or lacked one, like their modern relative the llama.
