It just got icy at The West Woods Nature Center.
This special feature focuses on the megafauna, the large mammals, most of which are extinct, that roamed our neighborhoods in the few millennia approximately 9,000-12,000 years ago following the retreat of the last glaciations of the Ice Age.
Visitors are greeted by a megafauna menagerie: skeletons the Ground Sloth and the “terror of the tundra,” the giant Short-faced Bear, both extinct. The lobby also features a lifelike replica of the extinct Elk Moose as well as a Caribou and a Musk Ox mount, two Ice Age animals that survive to the modern day in tundra regions of the northern hemisphere.
Via video and animal figure displays, Return to the Ice Age, free exhibit, introduces some of our region’s Ice Age animals that are now extinct, some still found in northern regions of the world, and some that survived to the modern day as local wildlife.
The West Woods Nature Center is open daily 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at 9465 Kinsman Road (Route 87) Russell & Newbury Twps.
(Russell, OH 44072) Call 440-286-9516 with questions.
Through April 2015, Geauga Park District’s Return to the Ice Age coincides with, and provides a Geauga County focus complimenting, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History’s Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age. Admission to the exhibit is free with museum admission; find details at cmnh.org.
So, What Real Ice-Age Pachyderm Bones Are on Display?
A leg bone thought to be from the American Mastodon found while digging a cattle-watering pond in 1871 in Montville Township, from the collections of the University of Mount Union.
Jaw bones and molars from the 1964 mastodon find on the former Telling Belle Vernon Dairy Farm in Novelty, during the dredging of an old glacial kettle pond toward the intention of creating a golf course. The bones, on loan from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, were severely damaged by the dragline bucket. But museum staff and board members who pressed their children (including a young Harvey Webster) into service conducted a meticulous salvage operation yielding hundreds of bone and tusk fragments along with broken bones and jaw fragments.
A jaw and leg bones of a mastodon discovered while enlarging a pond on an Amish farm in Middlefield Township in 1988. These bones, also on loan from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, were determined to be from a young mastodon.
“Sam’s Bones:” a grouping of Woolly Mammoth bones found in the stream gravels of the East Branch of the Chagrin River in Chester Township between 1942 and 1958 by Sam Whiting and family on their farm. Graciously loaned to Geauga Park District by the Whiting family, these represent a very significant Ice Age discovery for Geauga County, if not Ohio, as mammoth finds are very rare compared to mastodon and seldom include this number of bones
