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At the height of last glaciation cycle of the Pleistocene epoch, some 20,000 years ago, the Mississippi Gulf Coast was drastically different than it is today With much of our planet’s water locked up in ice, sea levels were some 400 feet lower than they are today, exposing a good portion of the continental shelf The courses of the Pascagoula, Pearl, and even the mighty Mississippi River had many more miles of land to traverse to empty into the Gulf of Mexico than they do today At first light on a cold January morning in 2020, Bustos set out with Springer and her USGS colleague Jeff Pigati on all-terrain vehicles to visit White Sands’ ancient tracks
The team wore parkas to keep warm amid a prevailing wind Springer recalls the hour-and-a-half journey through the dunes being like a “Disney ride” It was the “funnest thing in the world,” she says “Just being out there is surreal
”5 I recall reading somewhere that the best/safest way to “kill” a megafaunal creature was simply to penetrate the gut area, puncturing an intestine In a few days, septicemia will set in, so you just follow the wounded animal at a distance, waiting for it to weaken or die on its own In post-glaciated regions, where bogs are prevalent, the fever of septicemia likely would induce the mastodon to seek relief in a bog
“The one element which is not honest is why, if true, have the mainstream scientific community taken the scientific name of a “fossilized” organism that exactly matches the living counterpart and given that a completely different scientific name?” –That’s a sweeping generalization that generally is not correct In the case of mammoths, they are clearly NOT the same as Asian or African elephants, but they are unique species of elephants, rather than just more distantly related to elephants (like mastodons, or going further away from elephantids, Gomphotherium; further yet, Phiomia and so on…) That conclusion comes from bones, DNA, and other evidence, assessed with diverse methods And hence the different name is deserved: they are mammoths (member of a smaller group) and they are elephant(id)s (member of a more inclusive group)
There is zero dishonesty in any of this; just science’s incremental knowledge-sifting process at playAt the end of the Cretaceous period a meteorite struck the Gulf of Mexico, killing 75% of all life on earth This included all of the non-avian dinosaurs on land and all of the ammonites in the worlds oceans Nautiloids however, did survive this catastrophe, specifically Eutrephoceras
Because of this, the Nautilus is the sole shelled cephalopod swimming in the world’s oceans todayPlus, research silos limit that kind of systems thinking about prehistoric weaponry, Jun said And if stone specialists aren't experts in bone, they might not see the full pictureThe discovery of this site is very sensitive, not only for the precious gem-quality opal it contains, but also because of the signs of pre-historic Native American activity associated with the outcrop
This includes opalescent quartzite artifacts! A number of other quartzite-bearing outcrops have been discovered mapping in south Mississippi Therefore, it is entirely possible that other outcrops may also contain gem-quality Mississippi Opal“When we got the final dates back, it was very…” Springer pauses over Zoom, choosing her words carefully “The arrows were going to start flying
We knew we needed an explanation why these findings were really robust”They compared the mother's diet, as revealed by the analysis, to various omnivores and carnivores from the same period, including big cats, bears and wolves Her diet resembled that of Homotherium, a now-extinct scimitar-toothed cat that hunted mammothsMost of the types of rare trilobite fossils found in our Mississippi’s chert gravels are not from ones that once lived here
So then, how did they get here?They were once part of an ecosystem in the bottom of an ancient tropical sea which is now part of the mid-continent of North AmericaThe sea dried up and the land rose, exposing the limestone bedrock that contains these fossils at the surfaceThe diagnostic features of the blunt snout, large dorsal orbital sockets (though the eyes themselves are comparatively small), head profile, slender crouching front legs, and unexposed gill slits beneath the jowls are not similar of a that of or frog as the artifact was originally described It could be imagined salamanders were possibly quite mysterious to the artist’s world
A number of beautiful and interesting types salamanders are native to Mississippi and locally to the Jefferson County areaSome of this could be an artifact of resistance in the archaeological community to a growing body of data, similar to the long-standing resistance to accepting that humans were here before 12,900 years ago (a period know as the Clovis culture for the distinctive stone tools found from that time) I haven’t really seen widespread evidence for this, though And, if anything, I’m glad that fossil remains are held to really high standards– I wouldn’t want to start calling any bone with scratches or grooves a “kill site” any more than I’d want strong evidence tossed out because of overly restrictive definitions
Folks who are critical of the overkill model often cite the lack of stone tools associated with fossil bones In other words, it’s not just that we find few bones with cut marks, it’s that we also find few stone tools alongside themThe landscape, geomorphologically-speaking, was not much different than today Many of the landforms and even the rivers and streams would be somewhat recognizable with the exception of the coastline which extended miles out into what is now the Gulf of Mexico
It could be imagined salamanders were possibly quite mysterious to the artist’s world. A number of beautiful and interesting types salamanders are native to Mississippi and locally to the Jefferson County area.Some of this could be an artifact of resistance in the archaeological community to a growing body of data, similar to the long-standing resistance to accepting that humans were here before 12,900 years ago (a period know as the Clovis culture for the distinctive stone tools found from that time). I haven’t really seen widespread evidence for this, though. And, if anything, I’m glad that fossil remains are held to really high standards– I wouldn’t want to start calling any bone with scratches or grooves a “kill site” any more than I’d want strong evidence tossed out because of overly restrictive definitions. Folks who are critical of the overkill model often cite the lack of stone tools associated with fossil bones. In other words, it’s not just that we find few bones with cut marks, it’s that we also find few stone tools alongside them.The landscape, geomorphologically-speaking, was not much different than today. Many of the landforms and even the rivers and streams would be somewhat recognizable with the exception of the coastline which extended miles out into what is now the Gulf of Mexico. The plants and animals though, which made up the ice-age ecosystem, would have seemed other-worldly. Mississippi was home then to giant mammals, called megafauna included mammoths, mastodon, tapir, giant bison, saber toothed cats, lions, dire wolves, giant bison, stag moose, great short-faced bear, spectacle bear, and the Paleoindian inhabitants that exploited this bounty of big game animals.
