OSU Breaks Ground On New Football Stadium, Promptly Finds 10,000 Year Old Woolly Mammoth Bones

Oregon Live – The 10,000-year-old bones of a mammoth and other extinct ice age mammals have been unearthed in the north end zone of Oregon State University’s Reser Stadium.

Construction crews digging up earth during the Valley Football Center expansion project uncovered a large femur bone from a mammoth as well as bones from a bison and a camel, OSU spokesman Steve Clark told The Oregonian/OregonLive.

“Our archaeologist believes this could have been the location of a pond, a watering hole for these animals,” Clark said, “or a place where they came to die.”

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Total nerd boner alert for this story. Seriously how cool is this? 10,000 year old bones of extinct ice age mammals?? Building your football stadium right smack dab on the place where these motherfuckers were roaming around?

Look at these things!

Come on, appreciate some history for me one time.

Long before regular traffic jams, a sprawling Fred Meyer and a Cabela’s outdoor-gear emporium dominated the landscape, Tualatin’s Southwest Nyberg Street, for example, was part of a prehistoric ice age trail for giant tusked mastadons.

“Animals who were sick would often go to a body of water and die there, so it’s not unusual to find a group of bones like this,” Davis said said in a statement issued by OSU. “We had all of these types of animals in the Willamette Valley back then.”

The discovery of the ancient mammal bones is not unusual in the Willamette Valley, where mammoths once roamed.
Davis said mammoths went extinct 10,000 years ago. The bones, he said, could be “tens of thousands of years old.”

Got to worry about the spiritual ramifications here though of course. I mean I’ve seen Poltergeist. I know what happens when you build shit on top of graveyards. Like this AD is in for a pretty rude awakening I think.

“Maybe the archaeologist can tell you if it’s good luck,” deputy athletics director Mark Massari said.

Yeah, no, probably not.