A Most Unlikely Paleo Hotspot in America: How a Quiet River Keeps Revealing Ice Age Giants in Southern Minnesota
Small towns in southern Minnesota are known for parks, breweries, and historic monuments. New Ulm has all of those—but what no one expects is that it also sits atop one of the most surprising concentrations of Ice Age megafauna in the region. For more than a century, mammoth teeth, tusks, bison bones, and even hints of mastodon have surfaced from beneath the city.
New Ulm is not a famous dig site, not a badlands outcrop, not a desert rich in exposed strata. It’s a quiet Midwestern town built on glacial terraces and farm country. Yet again and again, the Cottonwood River and local gravel pits reveal traces of long‑vanished beasts.
From a 1912 mammoth molar unearthed during street construction, to a tusk fragment mistaken for petrified wood, to a caramel‑layered molar split lengthwise by the river’s brutal tumbling—twelve confirmed mammoth or mastodon finds so far, with more rumoured.
Read more: https://marcusbrandel.substack.com/p/lost-bones-3-cant-spot-the-bison
A mammoth molar found in the center of New Ulm - Specimen #1 - Franklin Street Tooth
Photo Curiosity of The Brown County Historical Society and Museum
