NOVA features mammoth mystery
The tangled tusks of two Ice Age mammoths and the quest to unravel the mystery of their deaths is the focus of an NET Television-produced segment for PBS series "NOVA scienceNOW," airing Wednesday (July 30) at 8 p.m. CT on Nebraska Educational Television.
During the summer of 1962 on a ranch near Crawford, Neb., surveyor Ben Ferguson stumbled across some unusually large fossils. University of Nebraska paleontologists, including undergraduate student Mike Voorhies, were working nearby and were called to investigate. The scientists soon realized that what appeared was the remains of a pair of Ice Age mammoths. These two animals had struggled to their deaths, their tusks locked and intertwined like a pair of twisted tree trunks with one tusk poking into the eye of the other.
Why were they fighting? The segment of NOVA scienceNOW follows Voorhies, now retired and emeritus curator of vertebrate paleontology at the State Museum, and forensic paleontologist Dan Fisher as they try to solve the mystery of what ultimately led to the mammoths' deaths.
Trailside Museum of Natural History
During the summer of 1962 on a ranch near Crawford, Neb., surveyor Ben Ferguson stumbled across some unusually large fossils. University of Nebraska paleontologists, including undergraduate student Mike Voorhies, were working nearby and were called to investigate. The scientists soon realized that what appeared was the remains of a pair of Ice Age mammoths. These two animals had struggled to their deaths, their tusks locked and intertwined like a pair of twisted tree trunks with one tusk poking into the eye of the other.
Why were they fighting? The segment of NOVA scienceNOW follows Voorhies, now retired and emeritus curator of vertebrate paleontology at the State Museum, and forensic paleontologist Dan Fisher as they try to solve the mystery of what ultimately led to the mammoths' deaths.
Trailside Museum of Natural History
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