Other Utah Discoveries

Mammoths

Lower jaw of a large ungulate, probably a muskox, as it was discovered at Bear Lake during a low stand of lake level.

Two other mammoth sites were discovered in 1995. One was at Bear Lake, where the complete lower jaw of a baby mammoth was found in association with bones of a large ungulate, probably a muskoxen. The baby was only about a year old, its small teeth and jaws in marked contrast to the huge grinders of the Huntington specimen.

From a site near Logan, construction workers discovered the complete tusk of an adult mammoth, about 7 feet long and nearly a foot in diameter where it fit into the tooth socket. This tusk has an unusually tight curve of almost 180°. This tusk is on display in the Geology Department at Utah State University.

Muskoxen

Partial leg of the muskox skeleton excavated from the site of the new Huntsman Chemical Building on the campus of the University of Utah.

Muskoxen, today restricted to the high latitudes of Canada, Alaska, and Siberia, were once abundant in Utah. Two new sites have produced partial skulls of these exotic ungulates. One is from a gravel pit near the Kennecott Copper Mine west of Salt Lake City, the other from the construction site of the new Huntsman Building on campus at the University of Utah.

Both were from shoreline deposits of Lake Bonneville, roughly 18,000 years old. These and other records of muskoxen in Utah seem to indicate the presence of frigid conditions in northern Utah in the not-so-distant past.

Giant Ground Sloth

However, a partial skeleton of the giant ground sloth, Megalonyx jeffersoni, named for our third President who was the first scientist to describe ground sloth bones in North America, was discovered near Provo in 1992 in a Lake Bonneville shoreline deposit. This ugly, plant-eating giant, weighing probably two tons and standing 10 feet tall at the shoulder, came from ancestors that were tropical.

Halfway between the Arctic and the tropics, Utah's megafauna in the Pleistocene is perplexing and exotic indeed.

Other Animals

Little Dell dam under construction. The Pleistocene fossils found at the construction site were in the middle of the valley, just upstream from the dam.

Other recent discoveries of Ice Age animals in northern Utah include camels and horses from a site near the Kennecott Copper Mine, on the east flank of the Oquirrh Mountains; and horses, mastodon, and other smaller animals at the Little Dell Reservoir in East Canyon a few miles east of Salt Lake City.

The Kennecott site might be early Pleistocene in age, rather than late Pleistocene like all other Ice Age sites in northern Utah. Both sites have small rodents whose fossil jaws and teeth are a permanent record of their past existence. Because rodents evolved rapidly during the Pleistocene, their fossil remains can be used to establish approximate stratigraphic position; they are among the best index fossils we have for deciphering Pleistocene stratigraphic positions.

Confirmed records of Utah's Ice Age residents now number several dozen vertebrates, and the list is slowly growing. With each new discovery, we have the prospect of adding more details to the picture, and eventually of expanding our rudimentary understanding of the animals and people who came before us. The past is our prologue.