It might be the best classroom assignment that professor Loren Davis’ students will ever get.
Davis recently directed his anthropology students at Oregon State University to dig through a pile of soil excavated from the school’s football field, where workers discovered the remains of an ancient mammoth.
They spent the afternoon searching for extinct animal bones and fragments and learning how to identify them.
Anthropology student Annie-Rose Eaton said it’s the first time she’s done any excavating.
“This is so exciting,” she said. “I just think it's so fascinating to be able to find part of history and just kind of go back in time and see how things work from just the bones.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoIZVUWb04Q
The expansion of OSU’s football stadium took an exciting turn when an excavator came across a 4-foot-long femur while digging under the north end zone. The space will eventually hold the team’s new locker rooms and meeting spaces. But for several days, it was an archaeological dig site.
The initial discovery turned up thousands of bones and fragments, including the bones from a mammoth, bison and some kind of camel or horse. But not all of the dirt from the area has been examined and thoroughly excavated.
A large pile of dirt from the site was removed and set aside for what became a unique learning experience for dozens of anthropology students.
Davis said their understanding of what human life was like in the Willamette Valley thousands of years ago will be enhanced by what they can learn from the remains of the prehistoric creatures that also inhabited this part of Oregon.
EarthFix is a public media partnership of Oregon Public Broadcasting, Idaho Public Television, KCTS9 Seattle, KUOW Puget Sound Public Radio, Northwest Public Radio and Television, Jefferson Public Radio, KLCC and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. EarthFix and Innovation Trail also are partners in a collaborative journalism project.