(COURTHOUSE NEWS) – A 15-foot alpha male mammoth waits to welcome the first visitors to the museum. Behind the big guy, a mural depicts what patrons might have witnessed here some 20,000 years ago: herds of his fellow mammoths drinking from the lake humans would eventually call Xaltocan alongside other now-extinct species of horses, camels, saber-toothed tigers, and the oversized armadillos called glyptodonts.
Workers discovered the first fossilized remains here just three weeks after construction began on the Felipe Ángeles International Airport in October 2019. In September 2020, the more than 200 Columbian mammoth skeletons discovered here earned the site the nickname “Mammoth Central.”
The count has risen to over 600 mammoth specimens, making the site the largest deposit of Pleistocene-era fossils south of the La Brea Tar Pits, according to Mexico’s National Institute of Archaeology and History (INAH).
