Museum’s mammoth skeleton needs a name

The museum at the Springs Preserve is collecting possible names for the 14-foot-tall mammoth skeleton that greets visitors there. The deadline for entries is Friday. The winner will be decided the way any important choice is made these days: by a vote conducted on Facebook.

"The mammoth is one of our most popular features. It’s the very first thing people see," said museum curator Dennis McBride. "That’s our greeter."

Not everyone feels welcomed by the hulking skeleton with long, curved tusks.

"We’ve actually had little kids cry," said natural history curator Sali Underwood. "It’s kind of sad."

"They don’t want to go past it," McBride added.

The mammoth has been part of the collection since 1995, but it took on top billing last October when the museum moved from Lorenzi Park to its new $51 million home at the Springs Preserve near U.S. Highway 95 and Valley View Boulevard.

It’s actually a fiberglass and plaster replica of the Huntington Mammoth, an almost complete skeleton unearthed in central Utah in 1988.

The original bones, now housed in Price, Utah, belonged to a male mammoth that died at age 65 more than 10,000 years ago. The remains were so well-preserved that researchers could see the pine needles in its stomach.

Fossilized bones of the same type of mammoth have been found by the hundreds in the Upper Las Vegas Wash at the valley’s northern edge.

Legislation pending in Congress would designate a 22,650-acre swath of federal land along the wash as Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument.

The Nevada State Museum in Las Vegas is hosting a temporary exhibit highlighting decades of work researchers have done in the wash. So far, they have turned up the bones of mammoths, horses, camels, bison, North American lions and ground sloths as big as grizzly bears.

According to paleontologists and others who know about such things, the same rock deposit covers a sizeable portion of the valley, so there’s a chance your house was built on top of a skeleton like old what’s his name at the museum.

The naming contest coincides with National Fossil Day on Oct. 17, an actual event that the National Park Service and the American Geological Institute swear they are not making up.

Mammoth names can be submitted via Facebook or Twitter or in person at the museum. You can email your entries to education curator Stacy Irvin at sirvin@nevadaculture.org.

The three finalists will be posted on Facebook on Oct. 15, and voting will last through Oct. 18.

The winner will receive a plush mammoth and membership good for free admission to any state museum and the Springs Preserve. A plaque with the winning name will be added to the mammoth exhibit.

Names suggested include George, Tule, Wally and Harry – as opposed to Hairy, this being a Columbian mammoth, not the woolly kind.

Also in the running: Stephen Colbert.

Depending on the response, this could be the first of several name-that-museum-creature contests.

After all, Underwood said, they still have a ground sloth, a prehistoric horse and a dinosaur fish the size of a Winnebago.

At the moment, the only names they have are the boring scientific kind.

Contact reporter Henry Brean at hbrean@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0350.