Gentle Giants Roamed The Black Hills: Mammoth Site
Prehistoric Elephants Dated 26,000 Years Ago Find No Solace In Sinkhole That Exists Today As A Research Station For A Non-profit Board
On an open grassland in the Black Hills of South Dakota 26,000 years ago mammoths roamed. Located in that grassland was an artesian sinkhole, with warm water among a frigid land. The area attracted several mammoths, whether it be for water, or to feed on the green vegetation and the sinkhole proved to be the doom of these mammoths.
“This sinkhole was formed by a karst cavern collapsing, and that hole filled in with water. Mammoths would come down to the sinkhole to find water or food or whatever and they would get trapped. You or I would be able to get out, but elephants and mammoths are easily trapped by what you or I would think isn’t much of a wall as small as 3 feet. The issue is that mammoths have to throw all of their weight, say ten to twelve tons, to the front to keep climbing, and they can’t do that. In addition, the sides of the sinkhole were made of spearfish shale and when its wet, it is slick as the dickens. So, when mammoths entered they couldn’t get out and would just swim around in there until exhaustion.”, explained Dr. Jim Mead Director of Mammoth Site and lead scientist.
Mammoth Site, located in Hot Springs, South Dakota, is operated as a research station by a nonprofit board. “The nonprofit was formed in the early 80s. The building that covers the site was constructed in 1986 and it’s a huge building they did a beautiful job. I had two ladies come up to me asking, how come the mammoths died in a church. It actually does look like a huge cathedral on the site.”, Dr. Mead said. “We have three main projects that we work on, and we are essentially a research company funded by tourism. Our research includes the Mammoth Site, a cave nearby that is full of thousands and thousands of little bones, and we have a site in California on the Channel Islands where we research pigmy mammoths.”
The sinkhole was discovered in 1974 by accident when a company was excavating the site for a housing development. As they were scraping the surface, they came across mammoth tusks and decided to call in paleontologists to examine the site. Dr. Mead was one of the first to investigate the site along with Dr. Larry Agenbroad. “He (Dr. Agenbroad) and I were digging a mammoth kill site in southern Arizona next to the Mexican border. We finished that and were about ready to move up to a bison site right here near Chadron, when he got a call saying check out Hot Springs, South Dakota because that town has a hill they are cutting down and may have found some mammoths. So, Larry said to me, hey Jim take some of our crew and find out what’s going on, and that was the summer of 1974. We came up here and there was this big white knobby hill they were going to tear down to build houses. I looked at it and determined there could be two or three mammoths there and so they told us they would give us a year to dig up the mammoths and get them out of there. We started digging and found a few more mammoths and after we took those out, there were more beneath and it just kept expanding.”, recalled Dr. Mead.
Dr. Agenbroad became the site director after the site was established and worked to expand the site to where it is today. After Dr. Agenbroad’s retirement, Dr. Mead left academia to return to the site and take over as the director. Mammoth Site hosts visiting researchers, graduate students and interns, and invites visitors to experience a paleontological dig for themselves. The site has several digger programs throughout the summer that allow individuals to participate in excavating the site. “We don’t want to be just a tourist site. We want to talk about what it takes to do paleontology, so we have what we call the diggers program. People come here, they pay a fee and we put them up in a hotel and feed them and they come in and we show them how to dig and how to remove the bones. For instance, we have a large skull that we need to move and so they are going to learn how you put a plaster jacket on a 1,000-pound chunk of bone and wrap chain around it and lift it up with a crane to move it so that you don’t have a taco disaster, where everything just falls out the bottom. We have had people of all ages participate in the program, I think our oldest was 85.”, Dr. Mead explained.
“One of our main tasks from the site is to reconstruct the climate and environment of the ice age in the black hills and surrounding region. The other side of it is to better understand those animals.”, said Dr. Mead. “Interestingly, the elephants we are getting, when you look at the pelvic bone just as with humans, you can take the pelvic bone and tell male versus female. When you apply that to these mammoths, all of our sixty or so mammoths that we have found at this site are male. So, something else is going on here, not only is it taking the mammoths, but its taking the males. So, what age? Well most of them are in their twenties and thirties and you start looking at social structure and start looking at, what do human males do differently in their twenties and thirties versus forties fifties etc. So, we are seeing a social structure type thing. One could say the young males were careless, stupid, gullible, and elephants are matrilocal meaning mom runs the herd. She may have said, hey go check this out and they did and they’re still there.”
Jared Langenegger
A graduate of New Mexico State University with bs in wildlife and fisheries biology Jared spent 15 years working in fisheries and parks management. He enjoys camping, fishing, hunting, painting, and wood working.
Make Sure To Stay At:
Hot Springs KOA, which is located at the gateway to the beautiful Black Hills. Amenities include clean bathrooms, 24-hour laundry, a stocked camp store/gift shop, a cozy recreation room and our large heated swimming pool during the summer.