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The project was to involve two days’ worth of field studies for a University of Colorado student’s doctoral dissertation, but the project was abandoned when it was found that the remaining bones were buried under active railroad tracks. No further Dent research took place until 1973, when a joint team from the universities of Colorado and Arizona excavated a trench in the earlier bone bed area. At the time, the Clovis culture’s existence was not recognized by archaeologists, although Dent’s projectile points were recognized as belonging to a Late Ice Age ( Paleo-Indian) Native American culture. A third artifact, a broken, upper part of a Clovis point, was kept by its discoverer, railroad foreman Garner, and was given to the museum in the 1950s. Partial skeletons of five adult female and eight young mammoths were recovered and taken to the Denver museum with two complete Clovis spear points.
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He then contacted Jesse Figgins, paleontology curator at the Colorado Museum of Natural History (now the Denver Museum of Nature and Science).įiggins delegated further exploration of the mammoth remains to museum staff member Frederick Howarter, who conducted excavations in June and July 1933, with museum volunteers, trustees, Father Bilgery, and his Regis College students. In September 1932 Father Bilgery excavated some of the bones with his students, identifying them as mammoth. Word of the discovery reached Regis College geology professor and Jesuit priest Conrad Bilgery through one of his students, who was the son of the Dent Depot manager. After heavy spring rains in April 1932, railroad foreman Frank Garner noticed very large animal bones eroding from a deep gully draining through a low sandstone bluff west of the tracks.
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Railroad tracks serving the depot ran over eroded Ice Age terrace remnants south and west of the river’s modern floodplain. The Dent railroad depot, now demolished, was once located next to the South Platte River southeast of Milliken, Colorado. The site is situated along the South Platte River on the margins of Colorado’s western high plains. Our best-documented evidence for Colorado’s earliest hunter and gatherer inhabitants, people we call Clovis, comes from the Dent site, a naturally exposed bone bed of Late Ice Age and now-extinct Columbian mammoths associated with three stone spear points. Early colonists occupied Colorado’s rich and ecologically diverse landscapes in the waning millennia of our planet’s most recent major Ice Age, the Pleistocene, between 14,000 and 12,000 years.