Hueco Tanks State Park 
Discovery Tusk!
Millennia ago, the Columbian mammoth strode across Texas, stripping the bark from trees and fighting off human predators and saber-toothed cats. And for as long as I can remember, I've been fascinated by these colossal creatures. So I finally went looking for them.
Illustration by Fred Gambino
Here’s the plot of an episode of a fifties TV show called Science Fiction Theatre:
A baby woolly mammoth has been found preserved in the ice of the Arctic Circle. A group of scientists, including a sorrowful-looking female zoologist in a Peter Pan collar, melt the ice and stare in wonder at the prehistoric creature lying motionless on the floor. Could it possibly still be alive, in a state of suspended animation? The scientists administer a “galvanic shock,” and the baby mammoth miraculously scrambles to his feet. But something is wrong: He misses his mother. He begins to pine away until the zoologist, whose own child has died, rushes to comfort him.
But then she is injured in a car wreck, and by the time she recovers and gets back to the baby mammoth, it’s too late. The weakened, heartbroken creature greets her with a forlorn bleat from his trunk and falls over dead.
“Funny, isn’t it?” the zoologist says as she dabs at her eyes with a handkerchief. “Crying over an animal that should have died half a million years ago?”
When I tracked down this show recently and watched it for the first time since boyhood, it looked itself like an artifact of the Ice Age. The images on the DVD transfer were faded and skittery. The mammoth was played by a baby elephant wearing plastic-looking tusk extenders and scraggly tufts of hair glued to its head. But I had no trouble recalling the story’s haunting effect on me. Deep into adulthood the memory lingered: a lonesome lost creature imprisoned in time, a frozen heart made to beat again, a block of ice like a window through which the light of prehistory still dimly shone.
Back in the fifties in Abilene, as I sat in my cowboy pajamas watching Science Fiction Theatre, it did not occur to me to find this scenario far-fetched. I had a calm certainty that in my lifetime a mammoth would indeed be brought back to life. As it turns out, I might have been right. A number of frozen mammoths have been extracted from permafrost over the past century, and though they are very much dead and cannot be reconstituted by a galvanic shock, their nuclei could conceivably be inserted into the egg cells of an elephant, which would act as a surrogate mother. A group of Japanese scientists recently predicted that by 2016 the world may witness the birth of a baby mammoth.
If it happens, it will be a reunion of sorts, since humans and mammoths go back a long way. In Texas, the people we know today as Paleo-Indians were hunting mammoths a mere 10,000 or 11,000 years ago. By that time, the glaciers that had once covered much of North America were long gone. And they had never extended this far south, so there is no chance of finding a frozen mammoth in Texas, much less one in suspended animation. But mammoth bones are everywhere: emerging from eroded cutbanks, plowed up in farmers’ fields, unearthed in construction sites.
These bones are from Mammuthus columbi, the Columbian mammoth, not the woolly mammoth that was featured in Science Fiction Theatre. Columbian mammoths ranged farther south than their cold-weather cousins, throughout the Pleistocene grasslands and woodlands of North America, all the way down to what is now Mexico. They were larger than the woolly mammoths, reaching up to fourteen feet high, with domed heads and huge sweeping tusks.
Sixty or seventy thousand years ago, a herd of these creatures was foraging in a floodplain a few miles west of what is now downtown Waco. The landscape, in the waning millennia of the Ice Age, would have been prairies and lightly forested savannas populated with all sorts of vanished megafauna: camels, saber-toothed cats, ground-dwelling sloths that could rear up to twenty feet high, and massive armadillo-like glyptodonts that shuffled along like living boulders.
There were a few juveniles in the mammoth herd, but most were adult females. A flash flood, roaring out of the ancestral Bosque River, caught them at the bottom of a steep-sided tributary. Perhaps a few members of the herd were able to scramble up the banks of the tributary and get away, but the rest were struck by a lethal blast of moving water. The positions in which the mammoths’ bodies were found suggest that the adult females—in a protective gesture familiar to us from the behavior of modern elephants—tried to form a shield around the juveniles. But even full-grown mammoths could not keep their footing against the sudden velocity of the flood. Old and young drowned together as the water swept them away. Their bodies were then buried by subsequent deposits of soil and sediment and remained hidden from sight until 1978, when two Waco men, Paul Barron and Eddie Bufkin, came across what they thought was a mammoth bone exposed in the eroded wall of a ravine.
They knew they had found something interesting, but they didn’t know how interesting until archeologists from Baylor University began to dig at the site and uncovered the remains of five mammoths. Later excavations revealed as many as nineteen more, as well as the bones of an extinct camel and a single tooth from a young saber-toothed cat. Taken all together, it was a mother lode—“the largest single-herd, non-human-related [Columbian] mammoth death site in the world,” as John D. Bongino, a Baylor graduate student, described it in his 2007 master’s thesis.
In 2009 the Waco Mammoth Site opened to the public, adding to the reputation for eclectic tourism that Waco already enjoyed with the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and the Dr Pepper Museum. The site is located about four miles west of Interstate 35, where the Brazos River makes a northeasterly bend at its confluence with the Bosque. There is a parking lot for fifty or so cars and a small welcome center and gift shop, from which visitors walk down a path toward the site of the tributary. “Follow me to the Mammoths,” the signs read. High up on one of the light poles along the way, a ribbon marks the height of a Columbian mammoth. It’s a simple but startling reminder. The day I visited, I stared up at the ribbon, trying to imagine the colossal beast whose shoulder muscles would have rippled six or seven feet above my head.
Beyond the light pole is a steel bridge spanning a narrow ravine, the spot where the original bones were found. Most of the remains were removed years ago, encased in plaster jackets and stored in Baylor’s Mayborn Museum. Of the roughly 24 mammoths found at the Waco Mammoth Site, only 6 are still there, and they are on spectacular display in the elegant building on the far side of the ravine.
The building is known as the dig shelter. I found it to be as airy and hushed inside as an art gallery; indeed, the first thing I saw as I entered was a pony-tailed artist named Lee Jamison, standing on a scaffold and surveying his work on an almost completed mural of a mammoth herd fleeing from a wall of water. Visitors to the dig shelter can view the mural and exhibit from a catwalk that is suspended from the ceiling. The gentle smell of overturned earth rises from about six feet below, where in situ bones of the remaining mammoths lie in a matrix of the alluvial soil that was deposited over many thousands of years by the slackwater floods of the Bosque River. The three deepest-lying specimens are part of the nursery herd, but the most complete and spectacular remains on display were found in shallower soil, which means that these animals were killed not in the flood that engulfed the nursery herd but in a separate event, 10,000 or 20,000 years later, in more or less the same place, under probably more or less the same conditions.
“Mammoth Q” reads the label next to an impressive pile of sprawled and spavined bones near the entrance. Mammoth Q, a victim of the more recent flood, is the site’s star attraction, the only bull found during the three excavations. One of his ribs had been broken, not in the flood but long before; there’s a bulge where it had healed over. The beast’s massive pelvic bone is in one compressed piece, and most of the material is flattened and scattered, the great toe bones lying there like the playing tokens from some inscrutable ancient board game, the skull a caved-in shambles. In spite of the wreckage, though, it’s clear enough what this creature had been. All you need is one glance at the serpentine tusks growing out of the smashed skull, their tips curving emphatically toward each other. They’re immediately distinguishable from the shorter tusks of a modern-day elephant or from the long, sabre-like tusks of the mammoth’s slope-headed contemporary relation, the mastodon.
Scattered nearby are the bones of Mammoth R, a juvenile that was killed along with the bull. The younger animal was found in an interesting position, more or less athwart the bull’s tusks, and this gave rise to speculation that the bull, in a noble final gesture, had tried to heave the younger animal up and out of danger as the waters rushed in. It’s a touching thought, the idea of this prehistoric behemoth selflessly concerned with the safety of his young as he himself fought to keep from drowning. But more likely the receding floodwaters had simply trapped the body of the drowned juvenile against the tusks of its elder.
Nevertheless, at the Waco Mammoth Site the drama of that long-ago day is still eerily tangible. For me, there was something particularly poignant about Mammoth W, the female adult killed along with the bull and the juvenile in the later flood, whose bones lie forty or fifty feet away from theirs. I stood on the catwalk staring down at Mammoth W for a long time, at a heap of ribs and vertebrae and disarticulated leg and shoulder bones still half-buried in the soil. The lower jaw had broken off and sat upright, so that I looked down upon the single enormous molar on each side of the mouth. The teeth were the size and shape of shoes, and the enamel striations on their surfaces created a pattern that made me think of astronaut footprints on the surface of the moon. Emerging from the ground next to the jawbone was the skull. It lay on its side, its occipital cavity still covered in dirt, the near tusk broken off, the other sloping down and disappearing into the earth.
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