Fossil Park to Open Minutes from Las Vegas Strip

Before whales, cheetahs, and sharks roamed Las Vegas, it was company central for Columbian mammoths, saber-tooth cats, and prehistoric camels.

That was 25,000 years ago, rearward inwards the later(a) Ice Age. And, starting this weekend, the fossils of these long-extinct megafauna put up follow found inwards one Las Vegas magnet you don’t get to hand 2,000 one-armed bandit machines to enter.

Ice Age Fossils State Park is located just now 20 miles northward of the Strip, in a portion of Second Earl of Guilford Las Vegas that was erstwhile part of the Upper Las Vegas Wash.

Yes, Las Vegas was at one time a mucky wetlands, not a desert. And after some of its former inhabitants died, mud and implant matter accumulated around their carcasses, forming pit casts that later filled with minerals from run aground irrigate and/or sediment and — voila! — fossils.

Monumental Mammoth, a life-sized sculpture that debuted at the Burning Man festival in 2019, greets visitors to Ice Age Fossils State Park. (Image: Nevada Independent)

The park’s paleontology science laboratory and fossil monument aren’t ready in time — sorry, Sir James Clark Ross Geller from Friends! — but visitors put up tour ternion trails. The most fossil-festooned is the Big Dig, a 1.2-mile loop named after 1962-63 interdisciplinary scientific hostile expedition conducted hither that was the largest of its form to that point.

The trails offer views of the ossified remains of all the area’s Ice Age mammals, including American lions, dire wolves, and run aground sloths the size of VW Beetles. (Note: Views are all that are offered. Taking, or even touching, the fossils violates province and federal laws.)

At the visitor’s center, guests canful study fossils and artifacts on display, get a video, and subscribe upwards for educational programs.

The 315-acre protected region — next to Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument — was acquired by the Battle Born State Division of State Rosa Parks inwards 1958.

In 2017, it was designated its own state parkland past former Nev. Gov Brian Sandoval, and its developing was completed lowest twelvemonth thanks to a $3.5 gazillion assignment from the Helmsley Charitable Trust.

Ice Age Fossils State Park, situated at 8660 N. Decatur Blvd., will undetermined from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays only, first Jan. 20.

Admission is $3 for adults and liberal for children 12 and under. For to a greater extent information, visit parks.nv.gov.

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