Waco’s mammoth monument marks major milestone

Roughly 70,000 years or so ago, not far from where the Baylor University campus stands now, catastrophe struck. A herd of about 20 Columbian mammoths found themselves trapped by rising floodwaters.

They did not make it out.

The evidence of that fateful day lay undisturbed until 1978, when a couple of boys searching for arrowheads stumbled upon the mammoth’s remains. The site is now the Waco Mammoth National Monument, celebrating its 10th anniversary this year.

Kaitlyn Holyfield, of the Waco Mammoth National Monument, joined the Standard to talk about the site. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:

Texas Standard: For folks who haven’t visited the Waco Mammoth Monument, can you describe what they’d see?

Kaitlyn Holyfield: Yeah, so we have roughly 108 acres of land, and about five acres of that is developed. And our rangers, who are the mammoth experts, will take you on a guided tour of our site, and they will tell you all about our Columbian mammoth nursery herd.

There are also nature trails that people are more than welcome to walk. We’ve got a mock dig pit that kids love. Parents don’t like it as much. Sand gets everywhere.

And yeah, our mammoth experts will talk to you for about 45 minutes to an hour about everything mammoth and Ice Age-related.

One of the centerpieces, I guess, of this site… I seem to recall there was a building in which you can sort of walk on these bridges and look down at the work of the archeologists, is that right?

Yes. So we actually have catwalks suspended above an active dig site. And so we have essentially just placed a big box, a building, on top of the dig site. And so you get to see the real fossils.

Most of the time, fossils are removed and they are put into museums. We built the museum around the fossils.

» MORE MAMMOTH MATTERS: Hunter discovers rare mammoth tusk on West Texas ranch

Oh, that’s cool. I said “archeologists.” Is that the right term or wrong term?

Wrong term, but it’s okay, a lot of people use them interchangeably. It’s paleontology, the study of bones.

Thank you very much. No buildings are going to be found out there. So, how much different was the Waco landscape back when these mammoths were around?

In some ways similar, in some ways very different.

So a lot of the trees that we have here today we likely wouldn’t have had during the Ice Age. They mostly would have only been around riverbanks.

When we talk about the landscape here, we always tell people, don’t think about “Ice Age” the movie, think about “The Lion King.” We were a savanna, we were a grassland, so take away most of the trees, add in about seven to eight-foot tall grass, and that’s what the landscape in Texas would have looked like.

So would these mammoths have been wooly?

Yes and no. So wooly mammoths are a different kind of mammoth. They were much smaller, about 10 feet tall.

Texas had Columbian mammoths and they were mammoths that were adapted to live in a much warmer environment. Texas, even during the Ice Age, was still kind of miserably hot. And so our mammoths adapted to have very little or maybe even no fur.

Oh, well, that makes sense. What are some of the big questions that researchers are still trying to answer related to this?

We are actually still trying to figure out what exactly happened to them.

So for a very long time, we thought that they were trapped in a flood. We brought in a national park service paleontologist five years ago, and she’s taking a closer look at our mammoths and we are kind of leaning towards the idea that maybe our mammoth were not involved in the flood and perhaps there’s actually a drought that killed these mammoths.

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Oh, really? Maybe you should bring in some archeologists. I mean, they might help.

Well, now, as I mentioned, 2025 is the 10th anniversary of the site becoming a national monument. Anything special happen?

Yes, actually next Saturday we are having a 10-year gala birthday event. We are celebrating 10 years as a national monument and the Waco Mammoth Foundation is throwing us a birthday party in celebration of that.

Wow, what are folks gonna get to do? Anything special on site?

Yeah, so we are going to have live music. There will be guided tours from the National Park Service paleontologist, as well as a couple of our other National Park Service rangers.

We will have a big birthday cake that we will be slicing up and eating. So it’s going to be a lot of fun.

We’re looking forward to it. You know, I remember when I visited the site not that long ago with family that there were some folks from Dallas who were really into bones. They were hardcore. They knew the site in and out and were telling us all about it.

Is Waco just a little slice of what you might find if you just went out in the general area? Is it possible that there are bones nearby that you haven’t found yet?

Very possible. In fact, we get stories all the time of fishermen on the rivers in the area that are not pulling up fish, they’re pulling up mammoth teeth and fossils.

So it is very possible that there are a lot more fossils in our surrounding area, but also on the site. We know that we have a lot more to find.

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