Digging for Woolly Mammoths

Have you missed your calling? Are you really meant to be an archeologist like Indiana Jones*-- hanging over snake pits, gulping down monkey brains and outrunning large rocks? Instead you’re trapped inside the career of a teacher, mechanic, pilot, or administrative assistant? Don’t worry it’s not too late!

Hop on a plane and head over to Mammoth Site in Hot Springs, South Dakota to follow your destiny! (I flew Midwest Airlines where the flight attendants still serve warm chocolate chip cookies for free- even in coach class. I ate 4 big, warm gooey cookies before 10 AM! )


At Mammoth Site amateur and professional paleontologists work side by side to unearth the greatest finding of Woolly and Columbian mammoths in North America. So far 55 mammoths have been discovered in one sinkhole. All of them are young adolescent males. Apparently male mammoths went out on their own in adolescence and these guys didn’t know enough not to go down to drink from a sinkhole that was too slippery and mucky to climb out. The fossils are around 26,000 years old and researchers are still not sure how many mammoths are left to discover. There may be as many as 100 mammoths and other animals layered under the already discovered animals.

The dig site is covered by a climate controlled building with walkways where visitors can watch volunteers at work digging fossils. It was amazing to see the fossils displayed in-situ just as they lay down in death thousands of years ago. You can see whole beasts stretched out as bones are painstakingly pulled from the rock and processed in an adjacent lab. On a guided tour I learned the nicknames for each mammoth and by the end of the visit I could easily pick out a mammoth tooth from a hip bone. In the museum we saw impressive re-constructions of huts built out of mammoth bones by early humans and learned about the other animals living and extinct found at the site.

The whole site depends on volunteers for excavation. Each dig season Elderhostel Groups, Earthwatch volunteers and Jr. Paleontologists work in this tiny out of the way town unearthing long buried fossils. If you’re on your way, be sure to sign up and be the first human to make the next mammoth discovery in Hot Springs.

I left the site with some photos and a fabulous yellow T-shirt that proclaims ‘Just Dig’ right on the front. I’m not ready to give up my career to follow in Indiana Jones’s* footsteps. It would be a life with a lot of travel, dirt covered toothbrushes and more patience than I can imagine. But I’d highly recommend a day at Mammoth Site where you can see fossils of ancient animals as they are first found lying in the ground until a volunteer patiently, slowly and repetitively scrapes away the dirt from bone.



*Disclaimer: The fictional character, Indiana Jones, was actually an archeologist, not a paleontologist. He did not discover any Woolly Mammoths in his films although he did get really dirty searching for old stuff.