Originally aired September 21, 2001

9/21/01 - Next week Nebraska ETV will air "Evolution", a new PBS series examining this controversial subject from the perspective of science journalism. It's been topic of intense debate for 142 years, since Darwin proposed that all life evolved from a single organism.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: • University of Nebraska State Museum http://www.museum.unl.edu/ • University of Nebraska Dept. of Vertebrate Paleontology http://www.museum.unl.edu/research/ vertpaleo/vertpaleo.html • Mammoth Site of Hot Springs, S.D. http://www.mammothsite.com/

This summer "Statewide's" Mike Tobias followed another look back at our past. A UNL researcher and a few volunteers spent hours digging in a vacant lot in Campbell, Neb. They were digging up the past - a time when mammoths roamed the plains, and also a time when finding mammoth remains made a big splash in this small town.

VIDEOS

Watch the Perspective story here:
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George Corner, University of Nebraska-Lincoln paleontologist, talks about the significance of the 1915 discovery of the Campbell mammoth remains.
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Corner shows the tusks from the 1915 discovery, now stored in a UNL warehouse.
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TRANSCRIPT - Campbell Mammoth

Reported by Statewide correspondent, Mike Tobias

They're looking for buried treasure in this dusty, empty lot in Campbell. It's the remains of an animal that roamed this land twenty thousand years ago. To find out why they're looking here - today - you have to go back nearly a century.
The year was 1915. Campbell had outgrown its old frame school. Workers digging the foundation for a new brick schoolhouse made an amazing discovery. The tip of something that looked like an elephant tusk.
University of Nebraska researchers took over and found much more. Two full tusks from a twenty thousand-year-old Ice Age mammoth. Eleven feet long, thirty inches around. They also found the animal's partially intact skull.
[George Corner] "As far as the shape of the tusks and everything, it was a magnificent specimen."
E. H. Barbour led the excavation. Some call him the father of Nebraska paleontology. For years Barbour traveled the state collecting samples for the University's museum. He knew this was a big deal.
So did the people of Campbell. Barbour's field notes talk of large crowds at the site. Sometimes a thousand people a day. That's twice the population of Campbell at that time.
[Lydia Pavelka] "I just remember my classmates and I standing… at the edge of the hole."
Seven-year-old Lydia Pavelka was one of those visitors. She watched with her second grade classmates.
[Pavelka] "I just remember that it looked like we were wrapping it. And it was very important and we were excited about it, like children would be, you know. Something important happening. But I don't think we visualized it as part of a great big animal. I don't think I ever thought of anything like that until much, much later in life."
The digging continued for about a week. The tusks and bones were removed, packed in crates and shipped to Lincoln. Then the search ended. The hole filled in, the school finished. The mammoth became a part of Campbell's history.
History repeated itself 86 years later. The school was demolished last winter - a victim of consolidation. UNL paleontologist George Corner returned to Campbell, armed with Barbour's original notes and photos.
[Corner] "But you can almost hear him talk through his notes and through the pictures that he took and so forth. He's still talking to us."
What's he saying?
[Corner] "Well, he's saying that we didn't find it all in the first place and you guys might be able to find it all this time."
Take a look around this University warehouse and you can see why they decided to look again. The shelves are stacked with thousands of bones from prehistoric mammals. Even though they're wrapped up for protection, nothing stands out quite like the tusks from the Campbell mammoth.
[Corner] "So they're certainly the largest set of mammoth tusks, elephant tusks, fossil elephant tusks that we have in the University collection."
The four-hundred-pound skull sits in another storage room.
[Corner] "You get an idea of just how thin-walled the skull is. Especially the cranium is just peppered with this honeycombed structure, very thin walled. So just from the shear weight of sediment, these things usually get crushed."
This mammoth was about 40-years-old and still growing when it died. Corner can tell by comparing the growth of the teeth to an African elephant. The Campbell mammoth was in the prime of its life. It might have lived at least another twenty years. It might have grown bigger than Archie, the best-known mammoth in the University collection. Like Archie, the Campbell mammoth is a Columbian mammoth.
[Corner] "Would probably look somewhat different than a wooly mammoth. Probably taller, the tusks a little showier, but certainly larger in most respects than a wooly mammoth."
Thousands of these large, awkward-looking beasts roamed the cold, dry, grassy plains of Nebraska toward the end of the Ice Age. So it's not unusual to find their remains. Finding bones in good condition is another story.
[Corner] "Tusks have a way of rotting away pretty rapidly, so the tusks anyway must have gotten buried in fairly quick order. Again, another clue as to initially why we thought the rest of the skeleton might be here. Because if you find tusks, they're a lot softer than the bone and the bone should be a pretty good shape."
And so they dig. It isn't glamorous work. Corner and volunteers spend hours in the hot sun. They pick through the dirt with trowels, screwdrivers and whiskbrooms, looking for the smallest bone fragments.
[Corner] "It's extremely labor-intensive; we'll put it that way. You sweat a lot, you move a lot of dirt, and you do a lot of things you don't normally do in the office, that's for sure."
[Betty Scheibel] "You just sit there a lot and do this little scraping."
Betty Scheibel taught at the Campbell School for twenty-five years. She's a regular volunteer at the dig.
[Scheibel] "Well, it's something I've always been interested in. When I retired from teaching I get to do what I want to do now."
Jenny Skupa took time off from working in her husband's insurance office.
[Jenny Skupa] "You're always wondering if you're going to… the next scrape of the earth is going to find you a piece of bone, or whatever."
Bob Levin has his own private fossil collection in Kansas. He's been digging for fifty years.
[Bob Levin] "Just the thrill of finding something. I do a lot of digging where I don't find anything so I've gotta take advantage of where I know there's something and go dig."
[Instructor] "When you do it, get your trowel and get this so you… kind of small like that."
[Gavin Raitt] "Okay."
Gavin Raitt is eleven years old. His mom drove him down from Hastings to help.
[Raitt] "I just love fossils, I guess."
[Man1] "Finding anything more drastic?"
[Man2] "This stuff we found this morning. Big chunk clear up… quite a ways above everything else."
And like 1915, the curious come to watch. Not by the hundreds, but a few at a time.
[Scheibel] "There's somebody that comes over, of and on, every day to see what's going on."
Barbour's original notes provide some clues about where to dig. Flags mark where bones were found in 1915. There's other evidence of the old dig.
[Corner] "This is just plaster residue that they utilized in 1915. And of course they didn't need to use it or something, it set up and they just threw it out. This would be the end of the pit that they dug to get the west tusk out. So here we have evidence of their dig, which helps us sort of see exactly where this thing was laying. And perhaps give us so clues as to where to start looking for some other material here."
This time there were no major discoveries.
[Mike Tobias] "What it is?"
[Corner] "Piece of rib. It's more in the ground. It was probably initially when they were hear in 1915 and then reburied with the other fill dirt."
[Skupa] "They uncovered that big one behind you there, today. And they uncovered the rest of the rib today. They had the big stuff in here and they found those when they were moving the dirt out."
They found pieces of ribs, another tooth and a few other bone fragments during a couple months of work. It wasn't the mother lode Corner had hoped for.
Corner isn't sure why they didn't find more. Maybe the bones weren't covered and preserved like the tusks and skull. Or maybe they just ended up in a different place. Ether way, the search is over.
Campbell may be the real winner. In some ways the town was at its peak when the bones were first when the bones were first found in 1915. Its population has steadily declined ever since. Like many small towns, vacant buildings are now a part of it's once bustling Main Street. Losing the school was another blow.
[Skupa] "I think some of the people that were really upset to see the school go find it interesting that, you know, there is something else going on here. Instead of just a vacant lot."
For a few months this summer, that vacant lot helped the town rediscover a little of it's past.