Friday, April 14, 2000
Mammoth find slows sewer plant
Museum Center will excavate for more remains
BY Randy McNutt and Janet C. Wetzel
The Cincinnati Enquirer
A mammoth's tooth uncovered at a Butler County construction site.
(Michael Snyder photos)
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A leg bone.
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WEST CHESTER — Sharma Young got unexpected news Wednesday when she returned a page from the engineering company at Butler County's Upper Mill Creek Water Reclamation Facility.
“I said, "So what's up?' A guy said: "Dinosaurs.'”
“I said, "I know sewers, but I don't know dinosaurs,'” said Ms. Young, deputy director of county environmental services.
While digging near the plant late Wednesday afternoon, a construction crew uncovered a tooth the size of a large man's hand and two leg bones belonging to a mammoth, a long-extinct form of elephant.
The bones were found in a 25-foot-deep trench being dug at the back of the Schumacher Commerce Park.
“I estimate it's about 15,000 years old, but it could be as much as 19,000 years old,” Dr. Glenn Storrs said from the site Thursday. He is curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Cincinnati Museum Center and holds a Ph.D., in vertebrate paleontology. Carbon dating of the wood debris found nearby will pinpoint the age within about 200 years, he said.
“It's been a number of years since a mammoth was found in place in the region; the early 1960s,” he said. “The last significant find was the complete lower jaw of a mastodon found in 1990, not far from here, in the Mill Creek in Lockland.”
Mammoth bones were also found in the 1950s in Evendale during excavation for a new building at the General Electric plant, Mr. Storrs said.
Mammoths had long, curved tusks and roamed North America, Europe and Asia during the Ice Age. There were both wooly mammoths and another variety known as Jefferson or Southern mammoths. They ranged in height from 9 feet to 15 feet.
Wednesday's discovery temporarily halted the plant's $18 million expansion project.
“We aren't digging until we can talk to the county commissioners,” Ms. Young said.
“But what really makes this significant is that we don't have just the bones,” Mr. Storrs said. Fossils at the site such as freshwater mus sels and snails, and tree branches will give details on age, environment and the climate.
It will take six to 12 months to carefully dry and preserve the specimens, Mr. Storrs said.
Mr. Storrs said when mammoths roamed around here, the Mill Creek area would have been boggy and swampy with lakes, ponds and streams washing out from the front of the melting glacial ice.
“The animals would have been living ahead of the glacial ice as it was melting,” he said. “It would have been heavily forested outside the valley, and quite swampy inside.”
County officials on Thursday gave the Museum Center permission to excavate the area to search for more bones. They did not expect the work to delay completion this fall of the project, being handled by Bowen Engineering Co. of Indianapolis.
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