An artist’s interpretation of ancient North American fauna. The new study led by The University of Texas at Austin Jackson School of Geosciences revealed that elephant-like gomphotheres, rhinos, horses and antelopes with slingshot-shaped horns were among the species recovered near Beeville, Texas, by Great Depression-era fossil hunters. Jay Matternes/ The Smithsonian Institution
The University of Texas (UT News) has a press release about some recent work to catalog and identify a large collection of fossils collected near Beeville, TX during the Great Depression. Described as a "Texas Serengeti", the collection includes specimens of elephant-like animals, rhinos, alligators, antelopes, camels, 12 types of horses, and several carnivores. In total, the treasure contains nearly 4,000 specimens. The animals roamed the Texas coast 11 - 12 million years ago. The paper describing these fossils can be found in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica.
“It’s the most representative collection of life from this time period of Earth history along the Texas Coastal Plain,” said Steven May, the research associate at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences who studied the fossils and authored the paper.
In addition to shedding light on the inhabitants of an ancient Texas ecosystem, the collection is also valuable because of its fossil firsts. They include a new genus of gomphothere, an extinct relative of elephants with a shovel-like lower jaw, and the oldest fossils of the American alligator and an extinct relative of modern dogs.
The fossils came into the university’s collection as part of the State-Wide Paleontologic-Mineralogic Survey that was funded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federal agency that provided work to millions of Americans during the Great Depression. From 1939 to 1941, the agency partnered with the UT Bureau of Economic Geology, which supervised the work and organized field units for collecting fossils and minerals across the state.
