Perhaps the only thing a crew of scientists digging up prehistoric bones at a Snowmass Village reservoir can be sure of is that they don’t know what will turn up next.

“Five species in three days. I am jazzed,” gushed Kirk Johnson, vice president of research and collections and chief curator at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, during a news conference Friday morning at the Base Village conference center.

The tally includes at least one Columbian mammoth, evidence of five mastodons, the bones of two ice-age bison, a small deerlike animal that has yet to be identified, and a humerus, or upper arm bone, of a giant ground sloth that stood up to 12 feet tall.

The discovery of the five mastodons was particularly noteworthy: Traces of only three mastodons had ever been found in the state.

“I’m proposing they change the (town’s) name to Snowmasstodon Village,” Johnson told The Associated Press.

Several museum officials, scientists and town officials offered an update on what is happening at Ziegler Reservoir, though the account of what has been unearthed can change as quickly as another shovelful of peat can be overturned.

Several specimens of the giant bones were on display Friday, as was the relatively small tooth of a mastodon that University of Michigan paleontologist Dr. Daniel Fisher, a mastodon expert,estimated came from a 3- to 5-year-old animal.

With winter fast approaching, the team is trying to exhume as many of the reservoir’s treasures as possible and preserve them.

“Our primary issue right now is preserving the bones,” Johnson said. They will be kept cold and moist, and allowed to dry slowly — a process that will take about a year — to prevent them from disintegrating.

The bones have not fossilized — turned to stone — and still contain protein and collagen, said Dr. Steve Holen, curator of archaeology and the museum’s resident mammoth expert. Because they are more than 10,000 years old, however, they are considered fossils. Scientists estimate the bones at the reservoir are between 12,000 and 15,000 years old.

Giant ground sloth

Denver Museum of Nature & Science illustration

It weighed as much as a mammoth and could rear up as high as a giraffe on its hind legs.

Length: Up to 19.6 feet

Weight: More than 3 tons

Diet: Herbivore

Source: BBC.co.uk