Mastodon, Denver Museum of Nature and Science - Denver, CO
Posted by: Outspoken1
N 39° 44.879 W 104° 56.620
13S E 504825 N 4399788
This life-size mastodon is to honor the huge find of mastodon's in 2010 during the construction of a reservoir dam to supply water to Snowmass Village.
Waymark Code: WMNGN9
Location: Colorado, United States
Date Posted: 03/13/2015
Views: 5
"Mastodons are any species of extinct proboscideans in the genus Mammut, distantly related to elephants, that inhabited North and Central America during the late Miocene or late Pliocene up to their extinction at the end of the Pleistocene 10,000 to 11,000 years ago. Mastodons lived in herds and were predominantly forest dwelling animals that fed on a mixed diet of browsing and grazing with a seasonal preference for browsing, in contrast to living elephants that are mostly grazing animals.
M. americanum, the American mastodon, is the youngest and best-known species of the genus. They disappeared from North America as part of a mass extinction of most of the Pleistocene megafauna, widely presumed to have been related to overexploitation by Clovis hunters, and possibly also to climate change." (from (
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"The Snowmastodon site, also known as the Snowmass Village fossil site or the Ziegler Reservoir fossil site, is a fossil excavation near Snowmass Village, Colorado. It was discovered on October 14, 2010, when construction workers building a reservoir dam to supply water to Snowmass Village uncovered fossil bones that turned out to belong to a young female mammoth. Official fossil excavations, organized by the Denver Museum of Nature and Science under the nickname "Snowmastodon Project," began on November 2, 2010. They ended, as agreed, on July 1, 2011, so that construction work could resume. During this short period, the project unearthed 4,826 bones from 26 different Ice Age vertebrates, including mammoths, mastodons, bisons, camels, a Pleistocene horse, and the first ground sloth ever found in Colorado.
The site, once the shores of a small glacial lake, dates from the Illinoian age of the Pleistocene epoch, around 150,000 to 130,000 years ago." (from (
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