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In 1978, two Waco residents, Paul Barron and Eddie Bufkin, were hiking through a ravine near where the Brazos and Bosque rivers meet when they noticed a bone sticking out of the wall. Scientists at Baylor University's Strecker Museum identified it as an upper leg bone of a Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi). Excavations led by Baylor since then have found at least 24 Columbian mammoths — 19 of them from a nursery herd of females and young, thought to have died together in a catastrophic natural event more than 65,000 years ago.
The monument
| Designated | July 10, 2015, as a unit of the national park system |
| Run by | the National Park Service in partnership with the City of Waco and Baylor University |
| Purpose | to preserve and interpret the discovery site of an exceptionally well-preserved mammoth herd and other Ice Age animals |
| Size | 108 acres within the authorized boundary — the NPS owns 4.93 acres around the discovery site, the City of Waco the rest |
| Location | within Waco's city limits |
The designation capped nearly four decades of research and community support.
A Geoscientist-in-the-Parks participant preparing a fossil mammoth rib at the site, 2020. NPS photo
Columbian mammoths in North America
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| About 1.7 million years ago | mammoths are thought to have crossed the Bering Land Bridge from northeastern Siberia |
| By about 126,000 years ago (end of the middle Pleistocene) | the Columbian mammoth had evolved from them |
| About 10,000 years ago | Columbian mammoths, and every other mammoth species in North America, died out |
The Columbian mammoth stood more than 14 feet tall and weighed up to 20,000 pounds — the largest of the three mammoth species known from the Ice Age, and bigger than today's elephants. It ranged across much of North America, including most of the present contiguous United States, and as far south as Costa Rica.
The landscape
The site lies in the Coastal Plain physiographic province, sharing its geologic history and some characteristic formations with a region far larger than the monument.
Further reading
- Mead JI, Tweet JS, Santucci VL, Rasic JT, Holte SE (2020). Proboscideans from US National Park Service lands. Eastern Paleontologist 6: 1–48. NPS DataStore
- NPS Foundation Document, Waco Mammoth National Monument (2016)
- From the park: science and research, maps, park home
Sources
Based on "NPS Geodiversity Atlas—Waco Mammoth National Monument, Texas," National Park Service, a product of the Geologic Resources Inventory, drawing on the monument's 2016 Foundation Document; a work of the United States government in the public domain. An image of the park brochure is left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.
Licens: CC0 1.0 (offentligt eje) · Bearbejdet efter www.nps.gov
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