The Waco Mammoths: A Herd That Drowned Together

In nineteen seventy-eight, two teenagers named Paul Barron and Eddie Bufkin were poking around a creek bank near the Bosque River on the northwest side of Waco, looking for arrowheads and fossils the way teenagers in central Texas have always done. They found a bone. Then another.

What they had stumbled onto was one of the most significant paleontological sites in North America. Excavations that followed uncovered the remains of at least twenty-four Columbian mammoths, a species distinct from the woolly mammoths of the far north, built for warmer climates and standing as tall as fourteen feet at the shoulder. The bones date to approximately sixty-eight thousand years ago.

Also found at the site: a camel that died in the same flood as the nursery herd, and a young saber-toothed cat from a separate event. The leading theory for how they died is a flash flood. Researchers believe that at least nineteen of the mammoths belonged to a nursery herd, females and juveniles moving together as mammoths do, and that they were trapped in a steep-sided river channel when water rose faster than they could escape.

The mud that buried them also preserved them, and a much later flood, about fifteen thousand years afterward, buried a small second group nearby. What makes this site unusual is the concentration. It is considered the largest known assemblage of Columbian mammoths dying from what appears to be a single recurring type of event.

You are not looking at animals that died over centuries. You are looking at a herd that died together. President Barack Obama designated it a national monument in July of twenty fifteen under the Antiquities Act.

The site spans five acres, with a hundred more reserved for future development. The bones are still in the ground.