Elephant-Like Animals, Rhinos, Alligators, and More are Part of Ancient ‘Texas Serengeti’

Some unemployed Texans engaged in work such work as fossil hunters during the Great Depression. These workers were able to retrieve specimens in their tens of thousands that have been studied in small bits and pieces while stored in the state collections of The University of Texas at Austin for the past 80 years.

After so many decades, a researcher at the University of Texas made a study and identified an extensive collection of fossils from dig sites near Beeville, Texas, and discovered that the fauna the make up a veritable Texas Serengeti along with specimens that included elephant-like animals, alligators, rhinos, antelopes, camels, 12 types of horses and several species of carnivores. The complete number of the fossil trove is about 4,000 specimens representing 50 animal species, all of which roamed the Texas Gulf Coast 11 million to 12 million years ago.

A paper published in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica, described these fossils, the history of their collection and geologic setting.

The research associate at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences who studied the fossils and authored the paper, Steven May, said that it is the most representative collection of life from this period of Earth history along the Texas Coastal Plain.

Also, in a bid to shed more light on the inhabitants of an ancient Texas exosystem, the collection is also valuable due to its fossil firsts. These have in them a new genus of gomphothere, an extinct relative of elephants with a shovel-like lower jaw, and the oldest fossils of the American alligator and an extinct relative of modern dogs.

As part of the State-Wide Paleontologic-Mineralogic Survey that the Works Progress Administration (WPA) funded, the fossils came into the collection of the university. WPA is a federal agency that offered jobs to millions of Americans during the Great Depression.

Though the survey lasted for three years, it discovered and excavated thousands of fossils from across Texas such as four dig sites in Bee and Live Oak counties, with the majority of their discoveries housed in what is now the Texas Vertebrate Paleontology Collections at the Jackson School Museum of Earth History. Several scientific papers, over the years, have been published on select groups of WPA specimens. But the document that studied the entire fauna is that of May Steven.

Matthew Brown, the director of the museum's vertebrate paleontology collections, said that the extensive collection of fossils is helping to fill the gaps about the ancient environment of the state.