- A prehistoric camel bone found in Utah is 33,000 years old.
- Initially thought to be 10,000 years old, the discovery reshapes Utah's history.
- The camel lived in a colder, wetter Utah during the last ice age, Utah researchers say.
VERNAL — Utah researchers say a prehistoric camel bone found in Uintah County nearly four decades ago is much older than initially believed, and is helping to understand better what Utah's ecosystem looked like tens of thousands of years ago.
The fossil bone of a camelops hesternus, an extinct camel genus that once roamed North America, was found to be approximately 33,000 years old after an extensive radiocarbon dating process, far exceeding initial expectations, according to the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum.
"We expected it to be from around 10,000 years ago, maybe 15,000 if we were lucky," Utah Field House curator John Foster said in a statement Monday, adding that all the other camelops pulled from the region have been less than 20,000 years old.
The fossil was discovered buried in sand and pebbles at a gravel pit along the Green River, south of Vernal, in 1987, and was quickly identified as a shin bone from a prehistoric camelops.
Utah Field House officials say the idea of native camels in Utah may seem weird, but that wasn't all too long ago that it was very common.
The species was quite common in the prehistoric Americas, ranging from modern-day Canada to Mexico, and settling into many U.S. regions, the National Park Service points out. They existed in North America at least 3 to 4 million years ago, standing approximately 7 feet high and likely weighing around 1,800 pounds.
"We have records of early camels in this region from tens of millions of years ago. They probably originated here in North America," said Steve Sroka, Utah Field House park manager.
However, they went extinct about 10,000 years ago, as noted by the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.
Researchers have found bones from the species all over the Americas since the 1850s, including multiple discoveries in Utah over the years, like the one in 1987.
The fossil had been displayed at the Utah Field House in Vernal for years, but experts still weren't sure how old it was. Greg McDonald, a retired Bureau of Land Management paleontologist and mammal specialist who identified the fossil, led a study to determine its age.
What they found meant that this camelops lived at a time when Utah looked vastly different. The region was colder and wetter than it is today, as it was toward the end of the ice ages, researchers said. Their findings were published in Historical Biology earlier this year.
It also lived alongside horses, mammoths, sloths and other native larger mammals that ultimately disappeared from North America — or the planet altogether — at the end of the last ice age.
