Tule Springs Fossil Beds: Ice Age Mammoths, Camels and Lions on the Edge of Las Vegas

Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument became the 405th unit of the National Park System on December 19, 2014, through the National Defense Authorization bill, with 22,650 acres transferred from the Bureau of Land Management to the Park Service.

The monument's desert landscape. Image from the National Park Service's page on its geodiversity

Where it is

The monument lies in the upper Las Vegas Wash, just north of Las Vegas and North Las Vegas, Nevada, bounded to the northeast by the Sheep and Las Vegas Ranges. Its neighbors include those cities, Clark County, lands of the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe, Bureau of Land Management and Fish and Wildlife Service land, state land, and Nellis and Creech Air Force Bases, whose training flights use its airspace.

An Ice Age record

During the wet periods of the Pleistocene, springs fed ponds, meadows, marshes and streams here. Their fine-grained deposits — the Las Vegas Formation — hold fossil plants and animals and their traces. The fossils at the monument span roughly 100,000 to 12,500 years ago, within a formation recording climate swings over at least the last 500,000 years.

The Tule Springs local fauna includes:

• mammoth
• horse and camel
• bison
• ground sloth
• dire wolf
• saber-toothed cat
• North American lion

There are also invertebrates, plant fossils and pollen. Together the spring deposits tell how the region's climate changed — and the plants and animals that fill North America today are the ones that survived the last Ice Age.

More: paleontology at Tule Springs · a Pleistocene treasure trove · the series Prehistoric Life of Tule Springs.

Setting and surveys

The monument belongs to the Southern Basin and Range Physiographic Province and shares its geologic history with a region far beyond its borders. This page is part of the NPS Geodiversity Atlas, from the Geologic Resources Inventory, which makes digital geologic maps and reports for more than 270 natural resource parks; the monument's scoping summaries, maps, reports and posters are listed in the NPS DataStore.

A photographer at work in the monument. Image from the National Park Service's page on its geodiversity

More: history and culture · science and research · park home · Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology.

Sources

Based on "NPS Geodiversity Atlas—Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument, Nevada," National Park Service, citing the monument's Foundation Document (National Park Service, 2019); a work of the United States government in the public domain.