![]() “It can tell us something about how ecosystems respond to climate change, which may tell us a lot about how plants and animals that live at significant altitude are going to respond to the global warming that’s happening today.” ![]() “To find such an exquisite fossil site from this time period at this elevation is virtually unheard of,” says Ian Miller, chair of earth sciences and the paleobotanist at the Denver museum who was one of the leaders of the excavation at Snowmass Village, nicknamed the Snowmastodon Project. The sediments under the reservoir preserve a nearly continuous record of change from 140,000 to 55,000 years ago, including a span of time starting about 130,000 years ago as a glacial period began to wane. Because of its high-altitude setting, the ecosystem represented by the Snowmass Village assemblage had been subjected to rapid changes in temperature and climate, both warmer and colder than today, over the last several hundred thousand years. Credit: ©Denver Museum of Nature & Science.ĭiscovered in 2010 by construction workers during a planned expansion of the reservoir, the assemblage was quickly brought to the attention of scientists at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Here, he examines soil layers among the driftwood on the "shoreline" of the Pleistocene lake. Geological Survey geologist Jeff Pigati helped excavate the site. Imagining these extinct creatures roaming the lower-elevation grasslands and forests of North America is strange enough, but Snowmass Village sits at 2,705 meters of elevation, making this alpine site one of the highest Pleistocene fossil localities ever discovered. ![]() But at the edge of the ski runs, under a man-made reservoir used for making snow, lie the ice-age stars of Snowmass Village: giant ground sloths, long-horned bison, North American camels, dozens of mammoths and mastodons and abundant insects and plant matter - basically an entire fossilized Pleistocene ecosystem. Snowmass Village, Colo., 270 kilometers west of Denver, is famous for being one of the premier ski destinations in the Rocky Mountains. Credit: ©Denver Museum of Nature & Science. In the end, scientists and volunteers collected 5,500 large bones and more than 30,000 small bones representing roughly 50 different species. But for a brief period in 2011, it was the site of one of the largest fossil excavations ever. This site at Snowmass Village, Colo., is now submerged beneath a reservoir.
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