The Mammoth Site of Hot Springs, SD

The bronze's first line has the family tree wrong. Mammoths were not ancestors of today's elephants but relatives, a branch of the same family that died out; the Asian elephant is their closest living kin. The rest it tells straight: a sinkhole fed by warm springs, a slick bank that let animals in and not out, and a giant short-faced bear among the mammoths. It credits the find to the Andersons' housing project, the owners of the land, rather than to the man on the bulldozer.

What the plaque says

Mammoth Site of Hot Springs, SD Gigantic Mammoths, ancestors of the elephants of today, once roamed freely across the High Plains of North America. A repository of their remains, along with other prehistoric animals, lay undisturbed until their discovery over 26,000 years later, in June of 1974. Limestone deposits beneath the Earth's surface dissolved in water from underground springs. The land then collapsed and the resulting sinkhole filled with 95 degree water that lured mammoths to drink or feed on vegetation. Once in the water they could not go up the slippery, steep incline. Death by starvation or drowning was the fate of most animals that came to the sinkhole. Along with the mammoth, remains of the giant short-faced bear, white-tailed prairie dog, fish and other associated fauna have also been found at this site. As centuries passed the sinkhole gradually filled. Rain, snow and wind deposited soil leaving a hill of buried skeletons. This hill remained undisturbed until 1974 when excavation for a housing project by Phil and Elenora Anderson revealed bones and tusks of these huge animals. Sponsored by the people and businesses of Hot Springs, the SD State Historical Society and the SD Department of Transportation

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Mammoth Site — steps away
  A housing lot in Hot Springs where a bulldozer turned up a tusk in 1974 and the developer gave up the subdivision for sixty-one mammoths.
• Wind Cave National Park — 9.2 mi
  A cave that breathes through a hole the size of a dinner plate, lined with nearly all the boxwork known on Earth, under a prairie restocked with bison shipped from New York.
• Needles Highway — 23 mi
  Fourteen miles that Governor Peter Norbeck laid out on foot and horseback through the granite spires, threading a tunnel eight feet wide.
• State Game Lodge — 24 mi
  The lodge where Calvin Coolidge spent the summer of 1927, fishing for trout, dedicating Mount Rushmore, and deciding not to run again.

More markers nearby

• Hot Springs SD — 1.3 mi
• Battle Mountain — 1.3 mi
• Leslie Jensen Scenic Drive — 3.5 mi
• John Stevenson Robertson: Pioneer Horticulturalist — 3.8 mi