Prehistoric Idaho

NARRATOR: Idaho's ever-changing landscape dates back hundreds of millions of years, long before we were here.

At one point in the land's evolution Idaho was under water, at another time, the days were extremely humid, at another, countless ancient species of predators and prey roamed the land.

Today, what remains of these creatures and their landscape are the fossils left behind.

Tens of thousands of fossils have been found in Idaho's soil and rock.

And researchers continue to make discoveries about what those fossils can teach us about the past and what Idahoans can learn from them moving into the future.

Whether it's dinosaurs, sabretooth cats, mammoths or dire wolves, each fossil has a story to tell.

And listening to those stories is paramount to understanding Prehistoric Idaho.

BRANDON PEECOOK: So these are bones of Idaho's best known dinosaur, oryctodromeus.

This is a tibia, so a shin bone.

Idaho right now is in this Renaissance, we are constantly finding exciting new fossils and those fossils are being shared with the broader scientific and public community.

I think it's just important for people to realize that Idaho still has so much more to show us and there's gonna be so many more surprises in store.

I know for sure that there's a few new species on the way and I expect that's gonna continue for quite a long time.

Idaho's fossil record is very, very rich.

ANNOUNCER: Funding for Outdoor Idaho is made possible by the Laura Moore Cunningham Foundation, committed to fulfilling the Moore and Bettis family legacy of building the great state of Idaho, by the Friends of Idaho Public Television, by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting NARRATOR: It's easy to be overcome by Idaho's beauty.

For us humans, it can feel like, it's always looked this way.

But if you step back more than 100 million years, our state would have looked very different.

The weather would have been more humid because of volcanic activity and much of the Northwest was covered with a freshwater sea.

The Earth had no ice, and forests extended to the poles.

The fauna and flora were diverse and dinosaurs ruled the land.

Dinosaur fossils are rare in Idaho, but one area of Eastern Idaho near the Wyoming border has proven otherwise.

We might not find a T-rex, but we can find the ancestors of one - along with other types of dinosaurs.

L.J.

KRUMENACKER: I think, I can't guarantee, but that might be an oryctodromeus tail bone in the rock right there.

This is unique for a few different reasons.

Number one, the main dinosaur we find out here, oryctodromeus, the burrowing dinosaur, it's a small body, dinosaur, hollow bones.

The bodies aren't very tough after they're dead.

They're just little dog size animals, about 11 feet long, but usually these animals are very hard to find the fossil record because their bones are so fragile.

Here in Idaho, they're the most common dinosaur.

Probably has something to do with them digging their own burrows.

I like to think of them as them digging their own graves.

Another thing that makes Idaho dinosaurs unique and kind of a pain in the butt is they're really hard to find.

As you can see, there's not a lot of rock outcrop out here.

NARRATOR: Even though they're ancient, in Idaho, dinosaurs have not been forgotten.

In 2023, a group of Idaho 4th graders convinced the legislature to designate the oryctodromeus as Idaho's State Dinosaur.

CHILD 1: Good morning, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee SEN. KEVIN COOK: This bill comes from a bunch of 4th graders and if you've never been lobbied by a bunch of 4th graders, you have missed out.

CHILD 2: This dinosaur has to be ours because it is unique.

NARRATOR: The formal designation states: "It is the intent of the Legislature in enacting this act to recognize oryctodromeus as the State Dinosaur of Idaho.

First discovered in 2006, oryctodromeus, which means "digging runner," was a small, swift herbivore that lived during the Cretaceous Period."

Gov.

Brad Little signed that into law on March 31, 2023.

GOV BRAD LITTLE: There you go.

[APPLAUSE] NARRATOR: The oryctodromeus isn't the only dinosaur to have been discovered in Idaho.

KRUMENACKER: I was out here a few years ago.

I'm just cracking rocks open, like I usually do.

And we found a part of a thigh bone, a femur, right here and instantaneously looking at it and say, okay, I know this isn't oryctodromeus.

I've seen orycto, there's tons of 'em.

I know it looks like.

This is different.

It looks like a meat-eaters' leg bone.

And it turns out it was a great, great, great, great grandfather, so to speak, of tyrannosaurus rex about 30 million years before T-Rex, but only about no taller than me.

Probably a little bit shorter even.

But it's important because we don't know a lot about where T-Rex came from and his ancestry, especially at this time.

[MUSIC] KRUMENACKER: I like to look at fossils and dinosaurs and other extinct animals, not just dinos, to show the variety of life that's possible.

Because it's almost like an alien world but it's actually right here on Earth, just in a different time.

To me it shows possibilities of what life could be elsewhere in the universe, elsewhere in the past, and they have that sexy monster appeal too if they're dinosaurs."

NARRATOR: In that same East Idaho area, a rural hill is littered with small egg shells from a prehistoric raptor.

KRUMENACKER: It's called a gigantoraptor because it's a big raptor dinosaur.

It's toothless.

I call it the hell chicken.

We'd be probably be up to about knee length, myself on the animal, to give you an idea of height.

It's a big, toothless dinosaur, big claws, probably feathered, again, like a big hell chicken.

Because it's toothless we don't know what they ate.

I like to think they ate whatever they wanted, frankly, plants and animals.

And actually that eggshell is the most common Idaho dinosaur fossil you will find.

NARRATOR: While dinosaurs may have roamed Idaho millions of years ago, their fossils are evidence of the now-extinct creatures that lived here.

A visit to the Idaho Museum of Natural History in Pocatello is a reminder that we humans are here for just a moment of time over the course of Earth's evolution.

PEECOOK: Idaho has insights into Earth history that other parts of the country, other parts of the world don't have.

So some of our most famous fossils, especially animals with backbones, vertebrates, are animals like the buzzsaw shark.

So this is one of the biggest animals on the planet at the time, 270 million years ago, that has in its lower jaw, almost a circular saw of teeth.

Idaho, because of the mines we have in our state, has the most specimens.

The most fossils of this really weird buzzsaw shark, it's called helicoprion, than anywhere else in the world.

So Idaho gives the world this really amazing insight into this animal that is truly incredible.

NARRATOR: Fast-forward a few hundred million years into the Ice Age, and Idaho would have looked a whole lot different.

For paleontologists in the state, this period of time serves as an exciting piece to the state's fossil record.

PEECOOK: Right now, all of human history, since we started planting grain and building pyramids, has happened in one of these interglacial periods.

So, Ice Age is always changing -- ice, no ice, ice, no ice.

And down here in Idaho, we're kind of at the bottom, the southern edge of where those big ice sheets would come in.

And so the Snake River plain was full during those interglacial periods.

That looked a lot like today.

Sagebrush and cottonwoods.

Except the animals were in some cases, very different.

We have our big Columbian mammoths.

They would've looked a lot like elephants today.

They're big and gray, very tall elephants.

We've got mastodons, which are kind of like elephants.

And those kind of would've been hairy.

We've got two kinds of giant sloth.

We've got giant camel, we've got a llama, we've got a couple kinds of bear.

We've got dire wolves, two kinds of sabertooth cat.

We have a real actual lion.

Horses.

And those are just the big animals.

What I think is really cool about Idaho's Ice Age record is those animals don't live, go extinct, and then all the animals that are in Idaho now show up.

When I go out and find a fossil of a giant sloth, I might find fossils of elk or turkey or black bear or normal gray wolf or bison.

So we have in Idaho's Ice Age, a mixture of all the animals, you know, from Idaho, living alongside elephants and sloths and lions.

So there is a very, very, very weird thing to imagine a time when you could get out of your time machine and see some mule deer get taken out by a saber tooth cat or something, but that's absolutely what would've happened.

NARRATOR: The Earth's history spans billions of years.

That timeline can get a little confusing, so here's a quick breakdown: There's four geological eras.

The first, the Precambrian, made up of more than 80% of Earth's history and is a time of simple mostly unicellular life.

After the Precambrian complex life begins in the Paleozoic Era, that was followed by the Mesozoic Era - the Age of the Dinosaurs.

After that the Cenozoic Era, with the Age of Mammals.

Within the Cenozoic Era are smaller periods.

With the most recent being the Quaternary.

The Quaternary can be divided into two epochs, the older Pleistocene and younger and current epoch, the Holocene.

The Holocene began about 11,700 years before the present, with the extinction of North America's megafauna, or giant animals.

You can't talk about fossils in Idaho without a visit to the Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument.

The fossil beds sit about 25 miles outside of Jerome in Twin Falls County and are home to fossils 3 to 4 million years old.

More than 200 species of plants and animals have been found in the bluffs along the Snake River.

But the area's most known for the horse quarry excavated in the 1930s.

ALEXANDER KIM: So in the late 1920s, a man by the name of HT Stearns, who worked for the USGS, was in the Hagerman area doing geology work.

And some locals recommended he reach out to a man named Elmer Cook, who was a Hagerman local.

And, Elmer Cook essentially showed him where these fossils could be found and told him he had been trying to reach other scientists for years now.

And no one was responding to his letters.

So what happened is Stearns went to the Smithsonian and recruited a man named JW Gidley, who many of the fossils were named after.

And Gidley came back with a team of paleontologists in the '30s.

And they had excavated from a spot known as the Hagerman horse quarry, roughly 3 tons of fossils, most of which are Hagerman horses.

And that's sort of why the monument is known for the Hagerman horse, is just the sheer quality and quantity of horse fossils that have been excavated from this particular spot.

NARRATOR: One question you might be wondering is what even is a Hagerman horse?

The answer is, the animal was actually more closely related to a modern zebra than a modern horse, stocky and about 3 and a half to 4 and a half feet tall.

The second question you might be wondering is why are there so many Hagerman horse fossils in one location.

KARINA RAPP: They believe that a large herd, a minimum number of, up to 150 individuals congregated during a drought to an isolated area where there may have been a remnant amount of water left.

And then may have died of starvation and dehydration and a seasonal flash flood would have washed their remains away and then deposited them somewhere where they would then be covered by silt.

That's very rare, usually in archeological and paleontological records that doesn't often happen.

You'd have to have a very specific reason for a mass kill-off like that, and especially to know that they all came from the same exact time is very special.

NARRATOR: Today the fossils are used to better understand our present-day animals.

RAPP: You can also study their biomechanics and use it to compare with modern horses and zebras and donkeys.

And it will give you a lot of interesting information regarding performance potential, if an animal was built for endurance or if it was built for speed.

We can see how much humans have affected horse breeding and what our modern horses look like.

NARRATOR: Water is responsible for the discovery of the fossil beds.

Ancient flooding across what is now Idaho helped expose the Snake River bluffs.

Most notably the Lake Bonneville flood that occurred approximately 15,000 years ago when the massive lake, that covered much of western Utah, flowed overtop its natural dam barrier.

It then crossed Red Rock Pass in Southeastern Idaho and moved westward along the Snake River plain, following the path of the snake river, through Idaho and into Washington.

SANDRA GLADISH: What I love about Hagerman, what I think is so neat, is just this: imagine you're back in time 4 to 3 million years ago, you see a mixture of past and present that is somewhat similar today, but very, very different in terms of the animals we have here of the plants we have here.

Because it was much wetter and warmer.

But you still do have a little bit of today found in the past.

NARRATOR: In 1988, the fossil beds were established as a national monument because of their significant paleontological contributions.

And today, the collection includes roughly 70,000 specimens.

Fossils allow us to deepen our understanding of all creatures, past and present - without them, our breadth of knowledge would be limited.

So how can millions of years pass and we can still find remnants of prehistoric species?

Well, a lot of little things have to happen to make it possible.

COYOTE SHORT: It's not just the soil.

It's how it got there and how it got there and ow it got there is we have lots and lots of volcanic activity.

The fossil has to be buried quickly and has to be an environment which it takes the oxygen away, keeps the atmosphere away from the fossil, and provides a area where it can be left alone, preserved without that disturbance for a very long time.

So the hot water that really contributes to the fossilization can go to work on the fossil NARRATOR: The hot water soaks into the volcanic ash, delivering silica to organic matter, like wood, bark, leaves and bone, petrifying them along the way.

That's one way fossils are formed.

SHORT: The definition of a fossil is any organic or inorganic traces of past life.

The best thing about it is don't ever dismiss a fossil.

It has a lot to say about itself.

And as we learn more about living things, we can see more about what's going on in the past.

A fossil has a lot of secrets in it, don't worry.

You can learn about the existing biology, but you can take that with you and you learn about past biology as all the sciences are connected in geology.

There's no item that ever escapes the scrutiny of geology.

NARRATOR: Jumping forward millions of years, dinosaurs are out, but mammoths, bison and humans are in.

That brings us to the Wasden Caves, where our story continues.

SUZANN HENRICKSON: We ran 12 dates on the bison bone bed and we basically look at the statistics, that's how we know it's a single date, because the standard deviation is so close.

So, yeah, anyway, science.

[LAUGHTER] NARRATOR: The Owl Cave, the Dry Cat Cave and Coyote Cave are lava tubes on private land that are only accessible through a partnership with the Museum of Idaho.

Excavations at the caves has resulted in the discovery of thousands of artifacts used by Native Americans, such as spears and projectiles, but also large fossilized bones from mammals including the dire wolf and the mammoth.

HENRICKSON: We're just outside of Owl Cave.

It was excavated in the 1960s and the 1970s.

And they dug about 18 to 19 feet of sediments.

And their goal really was to get to the bottom, the floor of the cave and on the floor, they found mammoth long bone, mammoth ribs.

They also found extinct camel, dire wolf, which was an extinct form of wolf that lived during the Pleistocene.

And the original researchers really felt that this mammoth did not end up in the cave naturally that it parts of the mammoth were dragged down to the bottom and processed.

Some of the bone was potentially used as tools.

And so what we're doing now is going back and evaluating that original find just to see if there's really, truly any evidence that humans and that mammoth are connected.

Idaho does have a really significant amount of Pleistocene animals.

So they're recovered from gravel pits.

They're recovered along the Snake River.

They're recovered in lava tube caves.

The one that we're sitting in front of and just the variety of species that have been found in Idaho.

It's incredible.

NARRATOR: The lava tubes were essential for the people that lived there at the time aiding in their ability to hunt and capture water.

And, the volcanic activity proved to be beneficial to the preservation of fossils in Idaho, something not every state has.

HENRIKSON: There actually are ash deposits in Southern Idaho that are older than the Pleistocene.

And there are actually a lot of fossils, animals that were just trapped in volcanic eruptions, you know, and so their bones are very well preserved in these ash flows.

[Music] NARRATOR: Even today, remnants of the past can wash up onto Idaho beaches.

In the summer of 2022, fossils from an extinct horse and mammoth were found buried beneath the sand.

PEECOOK: American Falls Reservoir, these beaches are maybe not the place people expect to find fossils, but it's actually one of the richest places in the whole state of Idaho to find fossils.

And so they're not as old as some people might think.

Things like dinosaurs are tens of millions of years old.

These fossils here at this beach are only about 100,000 old, which I know 100,000 years is a long time.

And this is the last time the Earth looked like this, an interglacial period.

[MUSIC] Here, just on this one little piece of beach, I think we have horse and bison and mammoth bones that are about 100,000 years old here from Idaho that we'll take back to the museum.

NARRATOR: Paleontologists use a plaster jacket to transport the fossilized bones back to the museum to research and learn more about them.

PEECOOK: So we kind of find the edges of the bone.

There were some flakes of another bone that's gone or it's eroded and it's not going to be worth trying to preserve.

So you gotta kind of find the edges of the one you're looking at, kind of dig down a little bit.

We call this, like, trenching.

You dig a trench all the way around and then what you end up with is your bone, hopefully on a pedestal kind of by itself.

Then you plaster jacket it, including some of the rock around the edges, hold that all together and then you can get a little more violent and dig your trenches deeper and flip it over.

Perfect.

And so a flip is like a big jacket, like when someone finds a dinosaur and it's like a jacket like this that's eight feet across and you flip it, then you put a top jacket on it to make it like a big old white boulder.

[MUSIC] NARRATOR: If we are to let history be a lesson, then fossils are signs that we can follow.

The fossil remains found across Idaho tell a story about the past, but can also give us hints about what's to come.

RAPP: It allows us to see how change happens and then it allows us to predict change in the future.

And that also allows us to study the mechanisms behind that change so that we can also, build better machines that are more efficient or in terms of animal breeding, you can breed animals so that they don't injure themselves as much and have less pathology.

Studying fossils.

there's so much you can do with it.

In terms of the smaller things like mice and birds and fish and frogs you can use them as indicator species for climate change.

These are animals that populate quickly and are very sensitive to their local environment, and usually don't travel very far from it.

So changes in those indicator species will tell us what was happening in the past with the climate, and then also inform us so that we can look out for these indicator species and see when problems are occurring.

NARRATOR: Studying prehistoric fossils tell us about prehistoric environments.

Imagine an Idaho that was far more abundant with lakes and marshes and forests.

Researchers can use that information to figure out how a change in environment can affect us - and our plants and wildlife.

HENRIKSON: The Pleistocene animals that we recover from these sites, their habitat is so critical, and if there are changes in that habitat, it can have very, very dramatic effects to the survival of an animal species.

KRUMENACKER: Idaho is a great state for fossils.

It's underrated in what's here.

A lot of people haven't done research on it and it just kind of gets looked over, especially for dinosaur fossils again, because it's hard to find stuff out here.

But the more we really, really put our nose to the ground and look, the more we find.

And I think there's a lot of potential for Idaho, for future scientists, to come out and pay attention.

NARRATOR: Fossils can also be a humbling reminder that the Earth is ever-changing and we're only granted a small window of time to leave our mark.

PEECOOK: There's gonna be another 100 million years going into the future.

And so understanding the actual trajectory, the story of who we are and what Idaho has been, I just think is inherently, like, really important, really wonderful.

And that that's saying nothing about the actual specific scientific questions people can ask and, and joy people can have from really understanding and experiencing these fossils.

[MUSIC] ANNOUNCER: Funding for Outdoor Idaho is made possible by the Laura Moore Cunningham Foundation, committed to fulfilling the Moore and Bettis family legacy of building the great state of Idaho, by the Friends of Idaho Public Television, by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

To find more information about these shows, visit us at Idahoptv.org