Ice Age Camel Fossil Found Along the Green River in Utah

Ancient North American camel species represented by 33,000-year-old shin bone

VERNAL, Utah — An old fossil discovery is providing new information to scientists nearly 40 years later. A fossil bone found in a sand pit near Vernal, Utah, in the 1980s has turned out to be an older-than-expected representative of a species of camel that was common in the region during the Ice Ages. A team of independent and Utah State Parks scientists published the results of the study in the journal Historical Biology this summer. 

The bone was found buried in sand and pebbles near the Green River, south of town, in 1987. It was then brought to the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum, where then Park Manager Alden Hamblin identified it as the shin bone of a camel. It has been on display at the Utah Field House for several decades, explicitly identified as the camel Camelops hesternus by retired Bureau of Land Management paleontologist and mammal specialist Greg McDonald. The northeastern Utah fossil’s exact age was unknown until recently.

A radiocarbon age on the bone recently revealed that the camel lived about 33,000 years ago. This indicates that the camel was here at a time dating from just before the last glacial maximum during the Ice Ages. Conditions in Utah would have been noticeably colder and wetter than they are today. 

Camelops hesternus was a distant relative of today’s Arabian and Bactrian camels and lived from over 3 million years ago until just less than 10,000 years ago, disappearing around the same time as horses, mammoths, ground sloths, and other large Ice Age mammals vanished from North America. When curious Utah Field House scientists sent the bone off to be tested for its precise age, they expected it to be a late-living Camelops. 

“The only other dated Utah Camelops, and most of those in the region that have actually been radiometrically dated, are from less than 20,000 years ago, almost 10,000 years ago,” said Utah Field House Curator John Foster. “We expected it to be from around 10,000 years ago, maybe 15,000 if we were lucky.”

The fact that it was from more than twice that, at 33,000 years, was a surprise but was not entirely unexpected, given the species’ long presence in North America. 

The age puts the camel as having lived about 7,000 years before Roxy the Cave Fox, the red fox skeleton collected from Whiterocks Cave in the Uinta Mountains last August. 

Despite the modern relatives of Camelops being today restricted to Asia and northern Africa, camels have a long history in North America.

Although native camels in Utah and North America may seem odd, until very recently (geologically speaking) they were a very typical member of this continent’s fauna. And the Vernal Camelops helps demonstrate that large camels roamed all parts of Utah during both the cold and warm times of our recent Ice Ages.