The giant pachyderms once roamed the Valley of Mexico.
Crouching in the dirt, workers gingerly stripped away layers of sediment with brushes, picks and spatulas, revealing jagged vestiges of a lost world.
“I think it’s going to be very significant,” said Dr. Emily L. Lindsey, assistant curator and excavation site director at the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum in Los Angeles. “These super-large accumulations of remains are not that common and represent a real scientific resource.”The species found here is the Columbian mammoth, which featured long, curved tusks and meandered across a broad range from present-day southern Canada to Central America.
Herds of mammoths thrived deep into the late Pleistocene era — which ended some 11,700 years ago — along the shores of Lake Xaltocan, which dried up decades ago and is now part of a semirural exburb that includes the Santa Lucia military base. “There are vestiges of mammoths buried all around here,” said Manzanilla, chief archeologist at the airport site, where scores of workers in hard hats and orange vests scrape through the earth. “We always knew there had been mammoths here, but we never expected to find so many.”
Hernán Cortés, who led the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, himself ordered that a prodigious leg bone be sent back to Spain, Díaz wrote, “so that His Majesty may see it.”
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