Through an executive order under the Antiquities Act of 1906, President Barrack Obama incorporated the Waco Mammoth Site into the National Parks system. KWBU’s Carlos Morales has more on the new designation for the fossil site and the steps that led to its designation.
At the beginning of a tour of the Waco Mammoth site, education coordinator Dava Butler, briefly mentions the various groups that help support the site. There’s the Waco Mammoth Foundation, the city of Waco, Baylor University and now the National Park service.
The site's new designation as a national monument means the National Park service will work with the City of Waco and Baylor to oversee it.
When the Waco Mammoth Site first opened its doors to the public and to tours like the one I’m on now – it was roughly 30 years after Paul Barron and Eddie Bufkin originally discovered the approximately 65,000-year-old remains of Columbian mammoths. The site covers a sprawling 100-acres of land, but the focal point is the 5-acre dig site where the fossils of 24 mammoths – including a saber cat and a camel – were discovered. Their bones are housed in a modern, climate-controlled building that was part of a roughly $4 million fundraising campaign.
When National Parks director Jon Jarvis visited the site in April, it was to gauge public support before he recommended its inclusion into the system.
“You know, my impressions going into the Waco Mammoth Park were that it already looks like a national park," Jarvis said.
But it took roughly 10 years and varying attempts to gain that status. In 2007, the Department of Interior conducted a survey that said the mammoth site was significant enough to become a national monument. After a location meets those requirements, there are then two paths to its incorporation.
“There are only two paths to the establishment of a new national park unit like this," Jarvis said. "There’s the congressional path and there is the antiquities path, there are no other paths that’s the only two you got.
Former Democratic Congressman Chet Edwards proposed legislation to make that designation happen - those congressional efforts ultimately fell short. But becoming part of the national park system through the Antiquities Act always seemed like the best opportunity for the Waco Mammoth site. President Obama has previously used it to establish or expand, 16 national monuments.
Back at the tour Butler, says she’s excited that the sites is now apart of the national park system.
“I’m actually a Waco native," Butler said. "I was born in 1978 just a few months after these were found. I’ve been hearing about them my entire life, they feel like family."
The Waco Mammoth Site is now the state’s 16th location in the National Park System, which includes landmarks from El Paso to Beaumont and down to Brownsville. But as Butler says during our tour, it remains the nations only known fossil site that contains a so-called “nursery herd” of mammoths. With the sites new status, Butler says, they’ll be given access to resources that will help with future excavation efforts.
And in the coming years, Butler says, they’ll increase their educational components, including adding an on-site lab, classrooms and an educational playground.