Saturday, May 12, 2001
Bison bones come home
Colorado City to display
fossil replica
By Ken Ellsworth
Reporter-News Staff Writer
COLORADO CITY — Some old bones have
risen again and Colorado City is celebrating.
The object of the celebration is the arrival
of a vinyl, duplicate life-size skeleton of a huge Bison antiquus,
the extinct ancestor of the buffalo. The animal was the subject
of a reception party Friday night. And she — or he —
goes on public display today at Colorado City’s Heart of
West Texas Museum.
The bison skeleton stands in its own special
display room, dominating its surroundings. Though only bones,
it looks as powerful today as it must have to the ancient people
who killed it 10,000 years ago inside the modern-day city limits
of Colorado City.
Its death could have made Colorado City
famous, but didn’t. So, folks here are hoping its vinyl resurrection
will soothe old regrets.
It’s a long, odd story.
In 1924, two Colorado City residents found
the bison’s fossilized bones protruding from the bank of
Lone Wolf Creek. They also found three sharp manmade stone weapons
with the bones. They packed everything in boxes and shipped it
to the Museum of Natural History in Denver, where the fossilized
bones were studied, reassembled and remain on display.
The find should have made history because
the presence of human beings, indicated by the weapons, at such
an old site had never been proven.
Most scientists of the day believed humans
had been in the New World only about 4,000 years, though that
was hotly debated. Because Bison antiquus had not existed for
at least 7,000 years, proof that human beings killed such an animal
would have extended the time span by thousands of years.
That was what Harold Cook, a paleontologist
at what is now the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, argued.
But few listened. Cook’s ideas were deemed too outrageous.
Besides, scientists said, the excavation in Colorado City was
not scientifically performed.
Two years later, human projectile points,
as the stone weapons are called, were found imbedded in the ribs
of a Bison antiquus at Folsom, N.M. That revolutionized archaeology
and paleontology in the United States; scientists finally accepted
that humans were here much longer than was previously thought.
And Folsom, not Colorado City, gained the
fame.
“It was a lost opportunity,” said
David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University
in Dallas. “We talk about Folsom culture and Folsom points.
We could have been talking about Lone Wolf Creek culture and points.
The textbooks all talk about Folsom. Every archaeological book
could have been talking about Colorado City.”
Brawny bones
Meltzer first came to Colorado City in 1990
to find the original site where the bison was found. Instead,
he bumped into Mayor Jim Baum, who was also interested in finding
the site. After several return visits, Meltzer thinks they narrowed
its location, but not closely enough to re-excavate or reconstruct
the site, which Meltzer estimates is 10,000 years old.
Instead, Meltzer and Baum began asking themselves
if the Denver museum would return the bison’s bones to its
rightful owner, Colorado City. The museum wouldn’t do that,
but it agreed to release the bones until molds could be made to
construct a duplicate skeleton.
It would cost $10,000. Individuals, civic
clubs and schoolchildren finally raised that and $7,000 more to
refurbish the museum and create a special place for Bison antiquus.
It arrived in March and was painstakingly assembled.
The skeleton is much larger than the modern-day
buffalo. It stands 6½ feet at the top of the hump and is
10½ feet long, said Louise Crawford, the museum’s
director.
Modern bull bison, or Bison bison, can weigh
up to 2,000 pounds, but Bison antiquus bulls weighed as much as
3,500 pounds, Meltzer estimated.
“That’s a lot of meat on the hoof,”
he added.
The largest of the animals were 7½
feet tall and some had spans of 6 feet between their horn tips.
The Bison antiquus shares its museum room
with a few fossilized mammoth bones that were found several years
ago about two miles south of Colorado City. More mammoth bones
were recently found at Champion Creek Reservoir, just south of
the city.
While the new find and recovery efforts
are creating a stir, museum director Crawford plans to fight to
keep the bison at stage center. She wears a bison necklace and
bison earrings. She has filled the museum’s store with bison
T-shirts and other bison souvenirs.
“I just like the bison,” she said.
“And we’re really glad we don’t have the real bones
because the real ones are starting to fall apart at the museum
in Denver.”
Paleontologist Eilene Johnson of the Lubbock
Lake Landmark, where human life has been dated back at least 11,500
years, said Crawford’s passion for the bison is well justified.
“The people in Colorado City should
realize that they have a really neat thing in their museum,”
Johnson said. “But they should also realize that Colorado
City is the home of a very significant site. It was one of the
first sites that helped to demonstrate the antiquity of human
life in the New World.”
Contact staff writer Ken Ellsworth at
(800) 588-6397 or 676-6777 or ellsworthk@abinews.com
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©2001, Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews / E.W. Scripps.
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