Two geologists from the New Mexico Bureau of Geology & Mineral Resources and a student from New Mexico Tech discovered a fossil at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge that paleontologists says lived during the Miocene era between 10
and 15 million years ago. The fossil, found February 22 embedded in a rock face, is from an oreodont, an extinct group of hoofed ungulates found only in North America.
Dr. Dave Love and Dr. Richard Chamberlin, geologists with the New Mexico Bureau of Geology & Mineral Resources, a division of New Mexico Tech, and Colin Cikoski, a New Mexico Tech graduate student, were conducting geologic mapping on the wildlife refuge when they came upon a fossilized upper and lower jaw and other fragmentary fossil bones.
“The closer we got, the better it looked,” said Dr. Love. The fossil was in a 10-million- year-old layer of sandstone and conglomerate of the Popotosa Formation of the Santa Fe Group. Dr. Love noted that it is the first known fossil discovered in this formation in the area. A team from the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science excavated the fossil, which was first wrapped in plaster to protect it during transport to the museum, where it will be further evaluated.
The fossil consists of a skull, lower jaws and part of the skeleton. The animal belongs to a group of large oreodonts that lived in the latter part of the Miocene epoch between about 10 million and 15 million years ago, very late in the oreodont’s reign. The animal had a large head, a small trunk, rather short legs on a longish body, and resembled a cross between a pig and a camel. Oreodonts were herbivores that probably browsed on leaves in streamside forests — the Miocene bosque.
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