Diggin' the South Lake Union Mammoth

By Dave DeMar

On Tuesday, February 11, 2014, an employee of Transit Plumbing, Inc. discovered a Columbian mammoth tusk at a South Lake Union construction site in Seattle. I had heard about its discovery that day but hadn’t given it much thought beyond “you never know when or where fossil discoveries are going to turn up.”



The Columbian mammoth is Washington's state fossil and had tusks
up to 15 feet long. These mammoths ranged across North America
until the last glacial retreat about 11,000 years ago.
Image by Charles Knight, 1922, public domain.

The following Thursday around 8:30 a.m., I received a text message from Dr. Christian Sidor, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Burke Museum and University of Washington Associate Professor of Biology, asking if I’d like to help excavate the mammoth tusk. “Sure!” I immediately responded, thinking what an adventure it would be to dig up an ice age animal in the middle of a city.

Drawing conclusions: One geologist's glimpse into ancient marine life



A fossil found at the Metaline Falls quarry.

Fossils are an important key to understanding life on our planet. They can tell us a lot about creatures who inhabited the Earth millions of years before us. Finding a fossil is one thing. Figuring out what the fossil once was, is another. That’s where geologists like Ed East come in.

Ed is a retired geologist and longtime Burke Museum volunteer and donor with a keen eye for identifying fossils. But when he recently was stuck while trying to identify rare fossils, he looked for a creative approach to discovering what they were and started drawing.

I sat down with Ed on his last day as a volunteer at the Burke Museum. After more than 30 years he had a lot of memories and research to sort through. He pulled out a file folder and spread dozens of fossil drawings across his desk, but before he could start describing them, a photograph caught his eye. Ed gently unpinned the old photo of a clean-shaven young man on his graduation day. "This is me when I attended school here," he said with a smile.

Piecing together Patagonia's ancient vegetation

Fossil site in Patagonia, Argentina.

Most people hardly notice what's on the ground beneath their feet. But to researchers like Regan Dunn, a graduate student studying paleobotany at the University of Washington, fallen leaves provide invaluable clues to understanding how climate change impacted life on earth - and how our actions today will shape the future.

Regan is part of a team led by Caroline Strömberg, Burke Curator of Paleobotany, that is studying 40 to 18 million-year-old plant and animal fossils found in Patagonia, Argentina. “This was a time with major climate change and some extinction events, so we really want to understand how vegetation was affected by these changes.”

To understand the impact of climate change on Patagonia’s vegetation, they set out to reconstruct what types of vegetation existed in ancient Patagonia. To collect data, Regan visited Costa Rica - which has a modern climate similar to that of ancient Patagonia.

The Dinosaur in the Lobby

Paraphysornis brasiliensis

Like many natural history museums, the Burke has a dinosaur in the lobby. Ours just happens to be a terror bird. (All birds are dinosaurs, but not all dinosaurs are birds!) In honor of this year's Dino Day, meet our terror bird.

The theme of Dino Day this year is "Predators and Prey"—and terror birds were top predators. These giant flightless South American birds had huge hooked beaks and sharp claws. Ranging in size from the 3-foot-tall Psilopterus lemoinei to the 10-foot-tall Brontomis burmeisteri, they probably killed their prey by stabbing it with their hooked beak. Their strong legs might have helped hold down struggling prey while the beak stabbed and ripped it.

Terror bird foot

As for who they ate, we can't be sure. Larger terror birds probably could have eaten small- to medium-sized mammals.

There are no birds alive today close enough to terror birds to tell us exactly how they lived and hunted. Modern large, flightless birds—ostriches, emus, rheas, and cassowaries—are not hunters (although they can be dangerous). Terror birds' closest living relatives, the seriema, may be close to what the smallest terror birds looked and acted like.

Terror bird head

The Burke's terror bird is a cast (replica) of Paraphysornis brasiliensis. It lived in Brasil 23 million years ago.



Dino Day 2012 is coming up on Saturday, March 3rd!

Posted by: Winifred Kehl, Communications

Giant Aquatic Lizard Fossil Installed in Burke Room

A 145-million-year old fossil marine reptile measuring 21 feet (6.4 m) in length was permanently installed in the Burke Museum on Tues., Jan. 15. The complete fossil skeleton, originally collected in Germany, is known as an ichthyosaur (meaning "fish lizard").

Painting of Ichthyosaurus by Heinrich Harder 

Ichthyosaurs (pronounced ik-thea-sores) are giant marine reptiles that lived in the oceans of the Mesozoic Era, while dinosaurs roamed the land. Though fish-like in shape, ichthyosaurs breathed air like whales and dolphins and gave birth to live young. Ichthyosaurs coexisted with other giant marine reptiles such as mosasaurs and plesiosaurs, also on display at the Burke Museum.


The ichthyosaur specimen is a major recent acquisition for the Burke Museum, donated by the Hart Family. Additional fossils from the Harts, including the mosasaur skeleton recently installed by Burke paleontologists in Hitchcock Hall on the University of Washington campus, join more than 2.75 million other specimens of fossil invertebrates, fossil vertebrates, fossil plants, and modern mollusks in the Burke Museum's paleontology collection.

Burke staff and associates unload the fossil

Burke Museum Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology Christian Sidor with fossil

The ichthyosaur fossil on the Burke Room wall.