Scientists knew the bone they found in a sand pit near Vernal 40 years ago belonged to a camel. What they didn’t know was that the camel liked the snow.
A radiocarbon age taken of the shin bone revealed that the creature it belonged to lived 33,000 years ago — during the height of the last ice age. It would have coexisted with the woolly mammoth at a time when an ice sheet covered the state and most of the rest of North America.
A team of independent and Utah State Parks scientists published the discovery in the journal Historical Biology in May.
Since its discovery in a sand-and-pebble pit near the Green River in 1987, the ancient camel bone has been on display at the Utah Field House in Vernal. Not until retired Bureau of Land Management paleontologist and mammal specialist Greg McDonald examined the bone a few years ago did anyone realize it was a camelops hesternus — something akin to a woolly camel. That got scientists wondering just how old the animal was.
“We expected it to be from around 10,000 years ago,” Utah Field House Curator John Foster said in a statement, “maybe 15,000 if we were lucky.”
John Foster/Utah State Parks This 33,000-year-old tibia (shin bone) of Camelops hesternus was found in a sand and pebble pit along the Green River near Vernal, Utah, in 1987.
Foster added that the only other Utah camelops that have been radiometrically dated lived between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. That was at the end of the last ice age, when temperatures were becoming warmer and drier.
This one lived when glaciers covered most of North America and Lake Bonneville was expanding across western Utah. It shared its habitat with giant ground sloths and saber tooth cats.
The Utah camelops hesternus stood about 7 feet tall at the shoulder and had longer limbs and knobbier knees than today’s camels. The one belonging to the shin bone likely also had a thick coat similar to that of a woolly mammoth. Since hair rarely preserves, though, Foster said that is difficult to prove. He also said it is unclear whether they had two humps, one or none at all.
This camel is “not quite a close cousin” to those found in Asia and Northern Africa and associated with hot, desert climates. Yet, Foster said, they share a common tie.
“We have records of early camels in this region from tens of millions of years ago,” Steve Sroka, the Utah Field House park manager said in a news release. “They probably originated here in North America.”