Mammoth emergency? Richland medical specialists help with 17,400-year-old bone

RICHLAND – Three employees of a Kadlec clinic in Richland have been working on the most unusual “patient” of their careers.

When the nonprofit MCBONES Research Center, which is unearthing mammoth bones near Kennewick, needed help with a large and fragile bone, it called Kadlec Regional Medical Center.

At least six years ago MCBONES volunteers carefully excavated the left shoulder blade called a scapula from a mammoth that lived 17,450 years ago before its bones ended up on a hillside just outside Kennewick.

When it was found, dirt was carefully removed from the ground around it, leaving it resting on a pedestal of soil. Then volunteers covered the top bone and a rim around its underside with a plaster field dressing to protect it before it was removed from the ground.

The bone measures 30 inches long and 20 inches wide, and in some places it is as thin as a quarter of an inch.

Some edges had begun to decay and were prone to flaking off, and the bone had developed cracks before the excavation began, said Gary Kleinknecht, the site’s education director.

So the bone from the Coyote Canyon dig site sat in storage for years.

Clarissa Carrizales, a medical assistant at Kadlec Clinic Northwest Orthopedics and Sports Medicine, applies casting material to a mammoth scapula unearthed near Kennewick.

The MCBONES (Mid-Columbia Basin Old Natural Education Sciences) team knew that cleaning the plaster from it and turning it over would put the bone at risk.

“Before we could flip it, we needed a custom support to cradle the bones,” said MCBONES volunteer Neil Mara.

But one of the center’s volunteers came up with a possible solution. They floated the idea of using the same material that hospitals use to make casts for broken limbs.

MCBONES found the expertise it needed to help protect the bone at Kadlec Clinic Northwest Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine. It sent Michelle Stigum, Ara Wilson and Carrizales to help.

Cast for a mammoth bone

“Never in my life did I think I would cast a mammoth bone,” said Wilson, a physician assistant. “It was so cool to be trusted with it.”

The team knew that casting materials that produce heat would not be good for the delicate bone, and they were also concerned about moisture.

They settled on a plan to use plastic wrap to protect the bone from moisture and then applied a lightweight fiberglass casting material to provide support to the bone.

The very thin areas of the bone were challenging, and they couldn’t risk lifting the bone as they worked.

The shoulder blade of an ice age mammoth is shown as it was being carefully unearthed, leaving a pedestal of dirt beneath it, at the Coyote Canyon dig site near Kennewick. Kadlec Regional Medical Center

“We did our best to try to mold the fiberglass around it but could not put much pressure on it.” said Carrizales, a medical assistant.

Their cast created a flat bottom that allows the bone to be turned over and sit securely, preparing it to be eventually displayed to the public.

MCBONES is planning to call on Kadlec for more help with the shoulder blade.

Previously Kadlec has allowed mammoth bones to be imaged by CAT scan during off hours, including a mammoth leg bone that was wheeled through the hospital on a gurney to the imaging department.

Such scans, like the one planned for the shoulder blade, will provide data that will allow replicas of bones to be created using 3-D printers.

“We want to have replicas so that people can touch and hold the replicas, instead of actual bones which are too fragile for excessive handling,” Mara said.

Bones and clues found

During the ice age flood, water backed up as it hit the narrow Wallula Gap to cover what is now the Tri-Cities. The dig site is at an elevation of about 1,060 feet, and floods may have been deep enough to reach the area about seven times.

The mammoth being unearthed as an educational project could have been drowned in the flood, and then the carcass could have been deposited on the hillside as waters receded.

The animal was large, likely standing 10 to 13 feet tall at the shoulder, making it bigger than modern day elephants.

It appears to be a male, because bone growth plates take longer to fuse in males. He likely was about 40 years old when it died with a front leg growth plate still unfused.

The bones have been found relatively intact – the ribs somewhat jumbled, for example, but not scattered over a wide area. Among those yet to be found on the hillside being excavated is the mammal’s right shoulder blade.

But bones are not all that volunteers are looking for at the site.

Dirt removed from the dig site is carefully screened by volunteers as MCBONES also collects small objects, such as beetle wings, ground-squirrel teeth, mice bones and mollusk shells.

Changes in objects at different levels of the dig provide information about the changing environment of the Tri-Cities area over thousands of years, including the environment at the time the mammoth lived.

Kleinknecht also is interested in learning more about a cluster of rocks found at the dig site, likely floated to the Tri-Cities area by an ice age iceberg.

Some rocks previously studied were linked by a high school science student to the area around northern Idaho’s Lake Pend Oreille, which was partially created by Ice Age floods.

See the mammoth dig site

If you’d like to see the mammoth dig site and some of the bones, register for a tour by going to mcbones.org and clicking on “menu” in the upper left and then “public tours.”

Cost for adults or children is $10 plus a $2.51 online fee.

Tour dates have been set through June, and registration for tours for the rest of the summer will be available online starting in early June.

To help protect the site from vandalism, people are sent directions to the dig site only after registering.

MCBONES also needs volunteers, including for screening dirt after it is carefully removed to uncover bones and for tasks in the dig house.

“This really is the coolest thing I have ever done,” Mara said. “When people talk about what they did over the weekend, I tell them I dug up mammoth bones.”