On 14 October 2010 a bulldozer operator named Jesse Steele was clearing the edge of the Ziegler Reservoir above Snowmass Village, Colorado, which was being expanded to give the town more water, when he turned up animal bones. His foreman took them home, looked them up on the internet and decided they belonged to a mammoth. The Denver Museum of Nature and Science and the US Geological Survey were brought in and dug alongside the construction crews, stopped for five months over the winter, and came back from 15 May to 4 July 2011 for a large-scale excavation while the dam was being built. Out of sediments laid down in an alpine lake during the last interglacial period came more than 36,000 vertebrate fossils, among them mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths, horses, camels and deer, together with more than 100 species of fossil invertebrates and more than 100 species of fossil plants.
Mammoths, mastodons and ground sloths, 36,000 bones · Pleistocene, the last interglacial
This ground is protected. Photograph it, record it, leave it where it lies. On US federal land the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act 2009 makes collecting vertebrate fossils an offence, and penalties are real.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
