Yesterday I was able to visit the Wenas Mammoth dig site outside of Selah, near where I live in Washington. It's a really neat thing to get to see something like that, a lot of museums will have people excavating "on site," with the museum built around a major dig, but getting to see one up close out in the boonies is pretty different!

The thing that's particularly significant about this site is that they are being allowed time to get all the bones "in context" by making painstaking analysis of the dirt around the bones. I am not sure what that means for the mammoth they've found, but they've also found some rocks used by humans to make tools. The dates they can get on the rocks don't tell when the humans used them, but if they can find evidence that humans killed this mammoth or they can get the age of the dirt around any tools they might find, then they will actually push the known date of humans appearing in the area back a couple thousand years earlier. So the real interest in this site (besides being local) is it's anthropological worth, not its value to paleontology.

Anyway, I got this shot of an Atlas Vertebrae, the coolest bone they've found so far. (unfortunately the head it attaches to is expected to have been crushed to bits accidentally by the road team that discovered the bones)