Vacation to South Dakota

Day 1 - Mammoth Site in Hot Springs

On the way to the Black Hills, we stopped at the Mammoth Site in Hot Springs, just a short drive from the Nebraska/South Dakota border. The building has been erected over the the site of an ancient sinkhole that contains the remains of over 50 mammoths and many other large and small animals that died about 26,000 years ago.

Dom standing by a life-size mammoth in the Mammoth Site museum.

Soft Spearfish Shale surrounds the Black Hills of South Dakota with a narrow ring of red dirt. When an underground cave in the soft rock collapsed about 27,000 years ago, a sink hole formed. Because area under the collapse was porous, water from under the ground made its way to the surface, forming a pond. Eventually the pond filled with enough sedement to block the underground spring, and the pond dried up. The new rock inside the sinkhole became harder than the surrounding shale and eventually what was once a hole became a hill.

The sink hole containing the mammoth remains was discovered in 1974 when a construction worker uncovered a tusk on the hill with his bulldozer. The 14-acre area was scheduled to become a housing subdivision, but after Dr. Larry Agenbroad, a professor from Chadron State College in Nebraska, exained the site and found bones from at least four to six mammoths, the construction was put on hold. After a year of excavation, a full mammoth skull was found and local citizens along with the Hot Springs Gem and Mineral Society formed a non-profit corporation to buy the land.

The current building was erected to protect the dig site from the elements with a controlled climate. The basement also houses a lab where bones that are removed from the site can be studied and replicas can be made for display in the museum that was built adjacent to the site and book/gift shop in 2001.

Here are a few highlights from the dig site and museum:

The most complete skeleton in the dig was found near the mouth of the sink hole. Because water was coming into the sink hole at this piont, the bones moved around a lot before they were buried in sedement. Because the bones are in such a disarray, this mammoth has been dubbed "Napoleon Bone-Apart" by the staff.

Napoleon Bone-Apart, the most complete skeleton at the site.

Near Nepoleon, is the complete skull of another mammoth, that clearly shows the shape of the head, including the tusks and eye sockets. A mammoth tusk contained thousands of muscles, but not one single bone, so the tusk is not visible. This mammoth is endearingly called "Beauty".

Beauty, a complete mammoth skull.

Another almost-full skeleton is found at the far end of the sink hole. The animal was near the edge (which can be seen because the dirt inside the sink hole is a hard yellowish tan sedimentary rock, while the surrounding area is soft, red Spearfish Shale. Before realizing that all of the mammoths in the sink hole are males, this one was dubbed "Marie Antoinette" because it's skull is missing. Today he's known simply as "Murray".

Murray was called "Marie Antoinette" before his pelvis bones
were uncovered and it was apparent that he was a male.

Mammoth society is thought to have been similar to the matriarchal society of modern elephants. When males became sexually active and rambunctious, they were kicked out of the herd and wandered alone until they found a new herd. While these males were wandering, they may have found the sink hole an appetizing sight. Because of the warm temperature of the hot springs in the area, fresh grass would have grown around the edges of the sink hole year-round. But the slippery shale at the edges did not provide a good foothold, and any large animal that fell in would have been unable to scale the walls and escape. They would eventually have died of exhaustion or starvation.

It was amazing to see the bones of these huge animals partly exposed in the excavation. I can't comprehend how people like my in-laws and my friend Kris's sister-in-law can deny the reality of geologic time and the existence of these magnificent creatures (and the dinosaurs) in the face of so much evidence. Kris told me that her sister-in-law recently said, "It's against my religion to believe in dinosaurs." Kris didn't know what she meant, but I did because I remembered my in-laws scoffing at a display about the big bang when we visited the Kennedy Space Center together several years ago. According to them, God literally made the universe in six days, only about six-thouhsand years ago. I guess he must have put fossils in the ground and background microwave radiation in the sky as a cruel joke or to test our faith. How can people deny evidence that they can see with their own eyes, yet at the same time believe that an invisible man who lives somewhere in the sky wrote a book that contains all the knowledge we will ever need?