I really enjoyed Mammoth National Historical Monument in Waco, TX. What made it so good was the tour with the ranger. She had a really great talk and gave us lots of information which made seeing the actual dig site that much better. Not long ago, some people exploring part of a dry creek bed found a big bone. They took it to Baylor who eventually realized it was part of a mammoth leg. The boys told them there was at least one entire skeleton, maybe more. This caught their attention because there were no know groups of mammoths. This turned out to be a herd of moms and babies, with more adult males found and some other animals. Waco area of Texas used to be a grassland with 6 to 8 foot tall grasses. These giant mammoths lived in family groups like elephants do today with adult bulls living alone. They had to eat hundreds of pounds of grass a day, which was no problem until there was a drought. They starved and eventually when it flooded the Brazos and Bosque Rivers brought them here. The bones are not quite fossils. The minerals are washed away but rock hasn’t been formed yet so they are like chalk. On the first dig the bones were removed and encased in plaster to preserve them. They are at the Mayborn Museum at Baylor. The second dig they left the bones where they were and built a shelter over them. The orange marker marks a broken rib that had started to heal on a young adult male mammoth. The archeologist assumes he got the break while fighting and died quite a while after the fight. When the site was first discovered, they didn’t have a full time archeologist or other staff to examine all the findings here. The city of Waco has now gotten to partner with the National Park Service and Baylor University. There are 100 acres in this park and more to discover. A mammoth only had 4 teeth. 2 top molars and 2 bottom molars. They chewed a lot of fibrous grass so their teeth had to be replaced constantly. New ones grew in from the back of the jaw and fell out the front. I can’t quite visualize how that worked. But that is what the ranger said.