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Judi Lynn

(160,215 posts)
Sat Sep 1, 2012, 04:17 AM Sep 2012

Ice Age animal bones unearthed in Mexico

Saturday, September 1, 2012
Ice Age animal bones unearthed in Mexico

Workers have discovered hundreds of bones belonging to Ice Age animals, including mammoths, mastodons and glyptodons, while digging to build a wastewater treatment plant north of Mexico City.

The bones could be between 10,000 and 12,000 years old and may include a human tooth from the late Pleistocene period, Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History said.

Tusks, skulls, jawbones, horns, ribs, vertebrae and shells were discovered 20 metres deep in Atotonilco de Tula, a town in the state of Hidalgo, as workers built a drain, the institute said.

These remains belong to a range of species including mastodons, mammoths, camels, horses, deer and glyptodons, the armadillo’s ancestor. Some bones may belong to bison while others have not been identified.

More:
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20120901/world/Ice-Age-animal-bones-unearthed-in-Mexico.435173

6 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
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Warpy

(110,903 posts)
2. No, but what seems pretty certain
Sat Sep 1, 2012, 09:19 AM
Sep 2012

is that whatever wiped them out at the end of the last Ice Age was continent wide.

Warpy

(110,903 posts)
4. Mastodons and mammoths followed vegetation, they didn't live on ice.
Sun Sep 2, 2012, 08:12 PM
Sep 2012

Maybe you need to review a few things.

aquart

(69,014 posts)
5. Uh, temperature affects food. Heavy fur and fat affects where you are adapted to live.
Tue Sep 4, 2012, 05:26 AM
Sep 2012

If your body is geared to tundra diet and temperature, that's where you eat or die.

So I ask again, was there an ice age in Mexico or did that heap of corpses arrive another way?

When you review a few things, maybe you can let me know.

NickB79

(19,111 posts)
6. The Ice Age was a global event, so yes there was an Ice Age in Mexico
Tue Sep 4, 2012, 12:39 PM
Sep 2012

While many associate the Ice Age with massive glaciers coating the land, only portions of the Northern Hemisphere were actually covered in ice. However, this global cooling event had effects across the entire planet. The sea levels were much lower, large portions of the planet were drier, and more grass-eating herbivores flourished over forest-dwellers as forests shrank around the planet. So, while Mexico wasn't coated in ice, it's climate was changed dramatically at the time.

And the species found were not exclusively tundra dwellers. The Columbia mammoth, for example, was largely hairless and native to the southern US and Mexico, while the giant sloths and glyptodonts were actually natives of South America that migrated north when the land bridge in Central America formed.

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