On the Road-Lincoln NE

University of Nebraska at Lincoln State Museum

September 14, 2009

ELEPHANTS AND CAMELS

Who would have known that millions of years ago Nebraska had elephants and camels walking around. Tis isbecause the land bridge that at one time stretched across Asia into North America allowed these animals to cross. At that time Nebraska was on the Equator. Once the ice age came and it got colder , the ancient elephant evolved into the Woolly Mammoth with hugely extended tusks and tiny ears. Elephants' ears are used for cooling themselves so the colder the climate, the smaller the ears. There were also Mastodaons here that looked a lot like the woolly mammoth but amny scientists believe that they are not elephants. The camels apparently stepped into some mud as the Nebraska sea was evaporating and camels were unable to extricate themselves and they died right there. They found the camels' upright feet and legs in a certain layer of rock under the earth. These camels only got extinct here 11,000years ago. A form of hyena called the Borophagus ate the camel carcasses when they could.

ALL ANIMALS LIVED IN THE SEA
At an earlier time, there was no atmosphere on Earth and all animals lived in the water. The whale was an ancestor of many animals and in NE, the rhino was a direct descendant of the whale. There were even sharks living in the NE sea 300 million years ago. When the oceans got too crowded, some animal pioneers ventured on to land and found that they could survive.

Nebraska has huge amounts of fossils and bones from these ancient animals. NE is most famous for fossils of the Cenozoic period. They found bones from 10,000 elephants so far and they estimate that there are 3000 more. At this point, still one in ten houses in NE has elephant or dinosaur bones buried under it. The stegasaurus was first found and named in NE and they dug up plenty of them.

SCALE TREES
The most common plant-eating mammal on the Great Plains was the Oreodont. The earlist tree type are scale trees. The museum had some fossils of them and these trees had no rings. Flowers first developed 199 million years ago.

DINOSAURS
Dinsaurs developed here about the same time as mammals. The stegasaurus was first discovered and named in NE. There were many of them found here as well as other dinosaurs. Dinosaurs and early mammals often swallowed stones that helped grind there stiff plant food so that it could be digested.