Mammoth Mania!

Remember the Aspen Summit? When we killed that hobo for sport, and buried his body out by the old pond? And the digging was a real bitch because we kept hitting enormous bones? Well, now I feel pretty foolish:

"... as the Snowmass Water and Sanitation sought to dig out the reservoir so it could store more water behind a new dam, the huge beasts that stalked the edge of the lake at least 12,800 years ago have been brought back to life in the collective imagination of Snowmass Village.

In the last three weeks, mammoth, mastodon, giant ground sloth and ancient bison bones have all been pulled up out of the layers of peat and silt at the bottom of the now drained reservoir.

The peat is nearly alive with iridescent insects, waxy leaves and fossilized snails, and has preserved, nearly perfectly, at least one Columbian mammoth and one delicate deer-like animal.

Below the soft peat layer, an older and greasier silt layer lurks. In its day, it captured at least five mastodons, three ancient bisons and a giant ground sloth. All were huge powerful animals, now long extinct.

'In 40 years, I have excavated a lot of archaeological sites, and I also work on paleontological sites, and I have never in my life been more excited to find a discovery like this,' said Dr. Steve Holen, the curator of archeology at the museum and director of the dig."