Iowa Almanac
Iowa Almanac -- Wednesday, August 14, 2024
A mammoth discovery. More from the Iowa Almanac in a moment. Aloha. Attached at the island. Right here in Iowa. Hi there. Andy Peterson, joined Gary Dolphin and I as we host the annual Tate and Dotty Cummins Memorial Pineapple Gala to benefit Camp Courageous. It's Friday August 16th at 6 p.m. at the Double Tree Convention Center in downtown Cedar Rapids. Enjoy a Hawaiian dinner live inside of an auction and more. To view auction items or for tickets simply go to kibcorages.org and we'll see you there. In the summer of 2001, construction was underway on a new parking ramp in downtown Des Moines for Allied Insurance and farmland insurance. A structure of that size obviously needed a strong foundation, so crews were forming support pillars by drilling down to bedrock with a giant auger, then pouring reinforced columns of concrete. On August 14th, 2001 the auger struck bedrock and more. Workers examined the area and found the auger had uncovered bones. Authorities were contacted and discovered they were mammoth bones from the animals that roamed the earth some 16,000 years ago. They were found to be from a woolly mammoth, one of the great beasts of the Ice Age. As the climate warmed with the end of the Ice Age, rivers, vegetation and the landscape changed. The world that mammoths dominated was no more and the long woolly coats that had protected them against the cold led to their extinction in a changing environment with warming temperatures. The bones found in downtown Des Moines were collected and are now part of a major display at the state historical building, along with a nearly complete mammoth skeleton found in Wisconsin. Bone fragments have been found in farm fields all over Iowa, but a sizable amount of remains were found while workers were digging for a parking ramp in downtown Des Moines on this state in 2001. And that's Iowa Almanac for August 14th, follow us on Twitter @IowaAlmanac. Until tomorrow, I'm Jeff Stein.