Wednesday, August 6, 2014

The Case of the Missing Elephant

It's like they temporarily turned into ghosts.

 They were here before the ash fell, and they were back afterward. The same species of them, in fact.

 But they disappeared into a cloud of smoke...um... ash... in that time in between.

 They left behind one possible footprint in the ash, as if to taunt us. 

 I am talking about a species from the family Proboscidea, which for the sake of helping out the public we refer to here as elephants. Specifically, this was a "true tusker." 

 So how do you hide a big animal like a tusker? They're BIG!

 Well... there are two ideas.

 First of all, we haven't uncovered the entire watering hold yet. We're kind of holding on to hope that one will turn up, just like we are still hoping for a carnivore.

 But then, there is also the idea that, as elephants tend to live in matriarchies, they were being led by a wise, old female that knew the way to the nearest river, and perhaps she was able to figure out correctly that a river would clear away the ash faster than a watering hole. After all, running water is cleaner. Plus, such animals would've been built for traveling greater distance than our Teloceras friends were.

  So that takes care of the grandmother and her younger female followers and their babies. But what about the silly adolescent males that got booted out of the group when they got old enough to be obnoxious? They were lumbering around unsupervised, getting into all sorts of problems as young males tend to do....  

 I'm not making this up. Really. And no, I'm not a super feminist using elephants to make a point. Actually, if you go to Hot Springs, South Dakota, to Mammoth Site, you only see young males that got themselves stuck in the hot spring. Great job, guys. 

 So I have no problem referring to the yet-to-be-found cousin of these guys as a "he" because, well frankly seeing as there has yet to be an entire herd of them found, the females seemed to have escaped somehow.

 Animals are pretty intelligent, especially elephants. Especially the older ones. If we could find a river that cuts through the ash, I would almost bet that there would be scattered female tuskers lying around, just waiting to be discovered. Maybe they had just migrated away for the season and were elsewhere when everything started going wrong, anyway.

 They say an elephant never forgets. Maybe I just need to go to the zoo and ask one of the cousins where their ancestors went. 

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My Story (Very briefly...)

Lots of people claim that they wanted to be paleontologists at the age of 3. So did I. The problem is, I never really grew out of it. My third birthday party had dinosaurs. Everywhere. I grew up digging in fossil dirt from Aurora, NC, looking for coral and shark teeth. I practically lived at my local science museums (and still do, only now I get to do research, fossil preparation, and work in collections!) When local paleontologists discovered a dinosaur with a "fossilized heart" (no longer considered such) when I was little, I got to meet the man who led the work. And then, years later a dinosaur bone with soft tissue turned up. I was officially hooked.
No longer was I dreaming about dinosaurs. I was actively pursuing the science behind prehistoric creatures. I didn't want to read about it, I wanted in on the action. So I started working at the museum, and finally going on my own adventures. And thus, I needed a place to share them and maybe inspire others the way I was inspired. I have gone from watching fossils be prepared from one side of the glass at the museum to working on them on the inside of the glass. I am a student working toward my goal. I can finally start to call myself a paleontologist.