An ancient camel bone found in a sand pit near Vernal nearly 40 years ago is still providing new discoveries for scientists. Utah State Parks provided an update on the fossil this week on their blog, sharing that it has turned out to be an older-than-expected shin bone of a species of camel that was common in the region during the Ice Ages. “A radiocarbon age on the bone recently revealed that the camel lived about 33,000 years ago,” shares the update. “This indicates that the camel was here at a time dating from just before the last glacial maximum during the Ice Ages. Conditions in Utah would have been noticeably colder and wetter than they are today.” Utah Field House Curator John Foster says, “The only other dated Utah Camelops, and most of those in the region that have actually been radiometrically dated, are from less than 20,000 years ago, almost 10,000 years ago. We expected it to be from around 10,000 years ago, maybe 15,000 if we were lucky.” The fact that it was from more than twice that, at 33,000 years, was a surprise but was not entirely unexpected, given the species’ long presence in North America. Read the entire update at stateparks.utah.gov.
