The wind whips through wheat fields at Coyote Canyon, on the outskirts of Kennewick, Washington. But this spot is home to more than just crops. It’s also the site of a glacially-paced mammoth dig.
In the late ‘90s, a front-end loader found some unexpected, very large bones mixed in with gravel.
“They didn’t know what kind of animal it was,” said Neil Mara, a research assistant at the dig.
However, mammoth experts knew what it was immediately: a fairly intact Columbian mammoth.
Now, people can tour the site, or volunteer to help dig, “ which is way cooler than just seeing a skeleton behind glass at a museum,” Mara said.
On a recent weekday, a gaggle of third graders from Pioneer Elementary School in Sunnyside toured the site.
This mammoth died 17,500 years ago, likely brought here by massive floods in the Northwest tens of thousands of years ago. Jonhatan Elizarraras, 9, said he learned about the dam of ice that broke near the Idaho-Montana border.
“All the ice melted, causing water to flow away,” Jonhatan said.
That started the Ice Age Floods. Water swept through most of eastern Washington, all the way to the Pacific Coast.
‘Bigger than elephants’
Gary Kleinknecht, the site’s education director, said the Coyote Canyon mammoth is different from what the kids are probably picturing.
“ What's missing?” Kleinknecht asked, showing an artist’s rendering of a Columbian mammoth.
“Um, the fur,” a shy student replied.
“The fur. Yes, the long hair,” Kleinknecht said.
In addition, the Columbian mammoth is way bigger than its cousin, the woolly mammoth.
A cardboard cutout of the Columbian’s left hind leg leaned against some shelves at the site’s science center. The leg stood at least 10 feet tall. Just imagine its tusks: “One of those tusks weighed 200 pounds,” Kleinknecht said.
“200 pounds,” the astonished kids whispered.
“Big tooth,” Kleinknecht replied.
That impressed 9-year-old Cormac Newhouse.
“Mammoths, some of them were bigger than elephants. And they're taller than my dad,” Cormac said.
Later, the kids got to hold a broken piece of bone that the front-end loader dug up. The bone is stored in a black Adidas box.
“That’s a real bone,” said Lincoln Mireles, 9.
“That’s part of our mammoth,” Kleinknecht said.
Moving beyond ‘trophy specimens’
When they’re not giving tours to kids, volunteers help dig out all sorts of tiny things that are buried around the mammoth bones, like pieces of lizards, beetles and rodents.
Bax Barton, the site’s research director, has studied lots of mammoth bones, including this one.
The group is interested in the smaller finds, he said, “to slow down and take a look at the bigger picture for these animals.”
Like learning more about the climate — and how that changed over time.
Most scientists, Barton said, don’t have the time to study the environmental factors that surround a mammoth dig. Lots of mammoths are found in spots where developers want the bones out of the ground as quickly as possible.
That’s not the case here. Volunteers are able to take their time.
The volunteer team catalogs its findings so that other scientists can reach out to study what they've preserved.
The dig site
At the dig site, stratified layers of sand, silt and mud show signs of the Ice Age Floods. Mara picked up the dig’s toolkit to show the kids — it’s got more than just shovels and trowels.
“Some of the tools we've got in here, we've got scissors. What do you suppose the scissors are for?” he asked.
“Cutting,” several kids said at once.
The team uses scissors to cut anything that grows in the dig area, Mara explained.
“ We can't yank it up by the roots because the roots might be wrapped around a bone, so we cut the grass,” Mara said.
Diggers catalog the smallest of finds, even the excavated dirt.
Tiny treasures
The kids get to try out some of those digging techniques. However, the dirt they sifted through didn’t come from the dig. It’s also seeded with owl pellets to make sure everyone finds something.
Mara dumped a bucket of dirt onto a super fine mesh screen.
“ Okay, listen up,” Mara said. “We're gonna spray water on this dirt, and we're gonna turn it into mud. And then, we're gonna reach into the mud with our hands. We're gonna stir it all up.”
The dirt immediately turned gooey. The kids reached in and squished the mud through the mesh. What’s left were bugs, rocks and tiny bones.
“I found a bone!” said Aliyah Alvarez, 9.
Turns out, it was the skull of a vole.
Every day at the site is an act of discovery, Mara said.
“Boy, doing the digging is such a cool thing. It's like opening a Christmas present, you know? You never know what's underneath that next shovelful of dirt,” he said.
And there’s still a lot more shovels full of dirt to go. Barton estimated the dig could continue for another five or 10 years.
