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A fossil bone found in a sand pit in the 1980s near the Green River has turned out to be much older than originally suspected.
It dates back to the Ice Age.
The shin bone comes from a species of camel that was found in the region at the time.
A team of independent and Utah State Parks scientists published the results of the study in the journal Historical Biology this summer.
The bone was found buried in sand and pebbles near the Green River, south of the town of Green River, in 1987.
It was then brought to the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum, where then park manager Alden Hamblin identified it as the shin bone of a camel.
The specimen has been on display at the Utah Field House for several decades, explicitly identified as the camel Camelops hesternus by retired Bureau of Land Management paleontologist and mammal specialist Greg McDonald. The northeastern Utah fossil’s exact age was unknown until recently.
Older than you think
Researchers, however, discovered a radiocarbon age on the bone revealed the camel lived about 33,000 years ago.
What that indicates is that the camel was here at a time dating just before the last glacial maximum during the Ice Ages.
Camelops hesternus along the Green River near Split Mountain 33,000 years ago. | Brian Engh via the Friends of the Utah Field House and Utah State Parks
The conditions in Utah would have been noticeably colder and wetter than they are today.
Camelops hesternus was a distant relative of today’s Arabian and Bactrian camels and lived from over 3 million years ago until just less than 10,000 years ago, disappearing around the same time as horses, mammoths, ground sloths and other large Ice Age mammals vanished from North America.
When curious Utah Field House scientists sent the bone off to be tested for its precise age, they expected it to be a late-living Camelops.
“The only other dated Utah Camelops, and most of those in the region that have actually been radiometrically dated, are from less than 20,000 years ago, almost 10,000 years ago,” said Utah Field House curator John Foster. “We expected it to be from around 10,000 years ago, maybe 15,000 if we were lucky.”
The fact that it was from more than twice that, at 33,000 years, was a surprise but was not entirely unexpected, given the species’ long presence in North America.
The age puts the camel as having lived about 7,000 years before Roxy the Cave Fox, the red fox skeleton collected from Whiterocks Cave in the Uinta Mountains last August.
According to a blog by Utah State Parks, red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) are the most widely distributed terrestrial carnivores in the world. They appeared in North America from Eurasia between 300,000 and 130,000 years ago. For much of their history here, they have been distributed primarily in western and northern North America.
Foster said it was a perfect specimen, with nearly every bone intact and well preserved.
Despite the modern relatives of Camelops being today restricted to Asia and northern Africa, camels have a long history in North America.
“We have records of early camels in this region from tens of millions of years ago,” said Utah Field House Park manager Steve Sroka. “They probably originated here in North America.”
Although native camels in Utah and North America may seem odd, until very recently (geologically speaking) they were a very typical member of this continent’s fauna. And the Vernal Camelops helps demonstrate that large camels roamed all parts of Utah during both the cold and warm times of our recent Ice Ages.
A camel shin bone found near the Green River 40 years ago has now been determined to be from the Ice Age. | John Foster, Utah State Parks
Ice age animals in Utah
According to the Utah Geological Survey, the animals that lived in Utah during the Ice Age included many of the same animals that we find here today, as well as many extinct forms such as mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths and saber-toothed cats.
Gravel quarries along the Wasatch Front contain the bones of many Ice Age animals. These gravels are deposits formed in Lake Bonneville.
The animals that roamed the shores of Lake Bonneville included big-horn sheep (Ovis), horses (Equus) and bison (Bison), whose living relatives are found in Utah today, as well as animals such as musk oxen (Bootherium bombifrons), camels (Camelops hesternus) and giant ground sloths (Megalonyx jeffersoni), who have living relatives in other parts of the world.
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