Ancient Camels Butchered in Colorado, Stone Tools Show National Geographic - February 27, 2009
Ice Age Camels Butchered in Colorado Live Science - February 25, 2009
Scientists have unearthed a camel jawbone in the Syrian desert that they think may be a previously unknown tiny species of the animal and say dates back a million years. The jawbone was found last month near the village of Khowm in the Palmyra region, about 150 miles northeast of Damascus, said Heba al-Sakhel, the head of the Syrian National Museum who was one of the leaders of the team of Syrian and Swiss researchers.
Last year, the team discovered the bones of a giant camel in Syria dating back 100,000 years. That animal stood between 10 and 13 feet tall - about twice the size of latter-day camels and the height at the shoulder of many African elephants.
The new find, along with the remains of the giant camel, could offer important clues about the animal's evolution, the researchers said. "It is a very important discovery," said Jean-Marie Le Tensorer, who leads the Swiss side of the team. He said it is the oldest camel bone to be unearthed in the Middle East and probably worldwide. The camel appeared to be very small and could be a new species, but he stressed that more studies were needed to confirm.
MSNBC - April 30, 2007 - Phoenix, AZ.
Workers digging at the future site of a Wal-Mart store in suburban Mesa have unearthed the bones of a prehistoric camel thatıs estimated to be about 10,000 years old. Arizona State University geology museum curator Brad Archer hurried out to the site Friday when he got the news that the owner of a nursery was carefully excavating bones found at the bottom of a hole being dug for a new ornamental citrus tree. "Thereıs no question that this is a camel; these creatures walked the land here until about 8,000 years ago, when the same event that wiped out a great deal of mammal life took place," Archer told The Arizona Republic.
Wal-Mart officials and Greenfield Citrus Nursery owner John Babiarz have already agreed that the bones will go directly on display at ASU. Archer said some of them may be placed on display very soon, but most will take several months ³to get sorted out and stabilized. In my 15 years at ASU doing this work I can think of six or seven times when finds this important have been made, Archer said. "This is the first camel. Others have been horses, once a mammoth on Happy Valley Road. This sort of thing is extremely rare."
BBC - October 10, 2006
Archaeologists have discovered the 100,000-year-old fossilized remains of a previously unknown giant camel species in Syria.The bones of the dromedary were unearthed by a Swiss-Syrian team of researchers near the village of El Kowm in the central part of the country. The animal is thought to have been double the size of a modern-day camel.It may even have been killed by humans, who were living at the once water-rich site during the same period. Jean-Marie Le Tensorer of the University of Basel commented: "It was not known that the dromedary was present in the Middle East more than 10,000 years ago."The camel's shoulders stood three metres high and it was around four metres tall; as big as a giraffe or an elephant. Nobody knew that such a species had existed," he said.
Professor Le Tensorer, who has been excavating at the desert site in Kowm since 1999, said the first large bones were found some years ago but were only confirmed as belonging to a camel after more bones from several parts of the same animal were recently discovered.
Between 2005 and 2006, more than 40 bone fragments of giant camels were found by the team.The big species has been found as far back as 150,000 years ago. But fossils from other species of camel have been unearthed at the site dating to one million years ago. Human remains from the same period as the giant camel have also been discovered at the site. The radius (forearm) and tooth have been taken to Switzerland, where they are undergoing anthropological analysis.
"The bone is that of a Homo sapiens, or modern man, but the tooth is extremely archaic, similar to that of a Neanderthal. We don't know yet what it is exactly. Do we have a very old Homo sapiens or a Neanderthal?" said Professor Le Tensorer." We expect to find more bones that would help determine what kind of man it was." El Kowm, the site where the remains were discovered along with flint and stone weapons, is a 20km-wide (14 miles) gap between two mountain ranges with natural springs.
October 2002 - Yahoo News
A geologist searching for earthquake faults at a construction site found something even more earth-shattering: the 100,000-year-old fossilized remains of a North American camel. Camels originated in North America 15 million years ago, and as they died out on this continent.
The discovery by Robert Lemmer yielded four vertebrae - the sixth and seventh cervical vertebrae, the thoracic vertebra and a neck vertebra. Later another neck vertebra was discovered in a 12-foot deep trench dug to search for quake faults in the parking lot of a bowling alley. Fossilized bones were covered in a plaster solution by two paleontological preparers, Howell Thomas and Doug Goodreau, and transported to a laboratory at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum.
No more remains were found in the area. "That would indicate it was either the kill of a predator or scavenged by something after it died, and the animal dragged off the other parts leaving the vertebrae behind," Thomas said. "Of course, that's just a guess. There's no way to know for sure. But it's a reasonable explanation." Thomas determined the exact species of the camel by comparing its bones with those of another camel at the museum.
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