Changes of Mammoth Proportions

by John Comer

The world changes. The planet upon which we live was once populated by creatures now extinct which existed in an environment unlike the present one. Go back something over 10,000 years, and what is now the State of Arizona could not have been described as arid Sun Belt country. The part of the present Sonoran desert where I live would have been cool, lush and green, according to Brad Archer, an ASU geologist, as quoted recently in The Arizona Republic.

It was Archer who was contacted by City of Chandler officials after one of their alert city inspectors discovered some interesting bones in an eight-foot deep newly-dug sewer line ditch.

The bones belonged to a woolly mammoth which had enjoyed munching the green growth in our lush, cool climate. Mammoths became extinct over 10,000 years ago. This particular one was of a variety called Mammuthus, smaller than an African elephant, but with an elephant-like appearance and long fur, according to Archer.

Early indications are that the bones may actually belong to two mammoths, and there are other findings to suggest that the site may have been where humans butchered the animals.

These paragraphs are being written in the middle of a Phoenix summer with daily temperatures on either side of 110 and possibly three months or so since measurable rain has fallen. This time of year on the Arizona desert about the only creatures foolish enough to venture out in the midday sun are humans. Even rattlesnakes and scorpions stay hidden away under shady rocks. It challenges the mind to conceive of those huge, long-extinct beasts munching dense, green foliage on the now rocky, barren slopes of Camelback Mountain or Squaw Peak, and in the cool, no less!

God gave us a changing, fascinating world and filled it with imaginative, intriguing creatures. Job was properly impressed when God spoke to him about the behemoth and leviathan. I have certainly taken notice that mammuthus may once have ambled along what are now our Valley freeway routes. The old map-makers who marked unexplored areas with the warning, “Here be dragons,” were not without reason for their fears.

As ditches continue to be dug, and bones recovered, we’ll learn more about God and his many-splendored world.