Ice age surprise: Bones are back at Tule Springs

For decades, scientists have collected fossils from the hills at the northern edge of Las Vegas and carted them off to collections from New York to California.

Now the bones of ice age Nevada are headed home.

In fact, almost 10,000 of them have already arrived.

National Park Service officials made the surprise announcement Saturday at a celebration for Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument, the almost 23,000-acre preserve established in December to protect a scientific treasure trove along the upper Las Vegas Wash.

Park officials kept the return of the fossils a secret since June 24, when a team of six people made the drive to Southern California to quietly collect the first batch from the San Bernardino County Museum in Redlands.

Eric Scott, the museum‘s curator of paleontology, greeted team members outside his basement office in June.

"I changed my mind. You aren‘t getting jack," he quipped.

Scott and his museum colleagues have spent almost 20 years collecting and cataloging roughly 100,000 specimens in the upper Las Vegas Wash, from 11-foot-long mammoth tusks to micro-fossils from rodents, reptiles, snails and mollusks kept in tiny glass vials.

Scott grabbed a vial at random from a tray being prepped for shipment and held it up to the light. Inside was the left tibia of an ice age deer mouse.

"It‘s bittersweet," he said as he watched the team from Las Vegas pack up years of his work. "On one hand, it‘s going back to where it came from; on the other, no one likes to see their collection go away."

Bones of contention

Technically, the collection belongs to the federal government. It‘s simply being transferred ’€” along with the land where it was found ’€” from the Bureau of Land Management to the Park Service.

The San Bernardino County Museum has been working under BLM contract to find fossils and determine the scientific significance of the area generally known as Tule Springs. The museum‘s first job there was to flag any ice age remnants on the proposed route for a power transmission line at the northern edge of the valley. The team from San Bernardino identified 36 different fossil sites along the 100-foot-wide transmission corridor, and that eventually led to a wider survey that yielded another 430 sites.

But the abundance of fossils only partly explains why the monument is prized by scientists. Equally important is the geologic context in which the bones are found ’€” a wide and well-preserved span that covers the last several ice ages and holds clues about climate change over the past 250,000 years.

Scott said the area also represents the last remaining undeveloped portion of a fossil-rich deposit that underlies much of the Las Vegas Valley, including portions of the Strip.

"I still think there‘s an ‘Ocean‘s 11‘ type movie (to be made) where you break into Caesars Palace and go down into the basement looking for mammoths," he joked.

San Bernardino‘s work in the upper Las Vegas Wash has been a source of bitterness for some people who objected to Nevada‘s treasures being hauled off to another state.

"That‘s the first question everybody asks: When are we getting the fossils back?" said Sandy Croteau, a founding member of the Protectors of Tule Springs, the small volunteer group formed about eight years ago to keep the fossil beds from being trashed or covered in homes.

Home means Nevada

But Croteau and her fellow Protectors insist Las Vegas owes a huge debt of gratitude to the San Bernardino team. The work by Scott and company helped make the case for the new national monument and played an enormous role in keeping it from becoming the valley‘s latest subdivision.

"San Bernardino has done so much for us. Because of them, we had experts out there," said Protectors of Tule Springs President Jill DeStefano during last month‘s trip to Redlands. "We were never resentful of the fossils being here."

Still, bringing at least some of the collection back to Nevada was a huge thrill for DeStefano, Croteau and the rest of the Las Vegas team.

"I‘m going to go buy champagne. Are you kidding? This whole thing is a celebration. My goodness," DeStefano said as she snapped pictures and oohed and aahed over the old bones being prepared for transport.

Keeping the return of the fossils a secret until Saturday was Vincent Santucci‘s idea. He‘s the senior geologist and paleontologist for the Park Service, and for the past few months he has been superintendent of the new Tule Springs monument. He led the group that went to Redlands last month.

When he delivered the news during the celebration at the Nevada State Museum in Las Vegas, the crowd of about 200 people responded with cheers and applause that swelled to a standing ovation.

Santucci said the state museum was the perfect place to make the surprise announcement, since the museum is playing host to the fossils returned so far. They are being kept in climate-controlled comfort in the same place the museum stores its artifacts.

Also during Saturday‘s event, the Park Service formally introduced Jon Burpee as the first permanent superintendent of the new monument and unveiled an exhibit dedicated to Tule Springs at the state museum near U.S. Highway 95 and Valley View Boulevard.

The mobile exhibit is an updated version of a display produced for the BLM by the San Bernardino County Museum, and it includes a fossilized jawbone from a baby mammoth that Santucci said could become "the icon for Tule Springs."

More left to collect

The museum in Redlands isn‘t the only place that still has fossils collected from Tule Springs. Santucci said other specimens are kept at the University of California, Berkeley; the Nevada State Museum in Carson City; the American Museum of Natural History in New York City; and the Autry National Center of the American West in Los Angeles. There is even a collection of fossilized pollen from Tule Springs at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

"Ideally, we‘ll get all of that back to Nevada in the coming years," he said. "We‘re not done here."

Of course, that will have to wait until the monument has a permanent home large and advanced enough to properly house the entire collection. And it won‘t happen at all unless the Park Service can persuade those other museums and research institutions to part with the fossils they have.

"We‘re not trying to do it as the big government coming in to take it," said Santucci, whose temporary assignment as superintendent of Tule Springs officially ends Monday.

Getting the fossils back to Southern Nevada should help bolster the case for construction of a visitor center and research lab at the monument site, Santucci said. Such a facility could be the central repository for all the fossils collected from the area so far and any collected in the future ’€” one convenient location for researchers to conduct both field work and lab work.

Santucci has no doubt the monument and its treasures will attract interest from researchers.

"This is a pretty darn significant scientific collection," he said. "All this information will be important to questions we don‘t even know will be asked yet."

And there is plenty more to be discovered in the monumental ice age boneyard north of Las Vegas.

As Santucci put it: "The fossil record is only as good as the last field season."

Contact Henry Brean at hbrean@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0350. Find him on Twitter: @RefriedBrean.