Paleontology in Nevada
Nevada has a rich fossil record of plants and animal life spanning the past 650 million years of time.
In the shallow seaways of the Triassic lived the Ichthyosaurs; typified by the Nevada State Fossil Shonisaurus popularis.
The deposits of this period show evidence of mammoths, a mastodon from Elko County, sabre-toothed cats, dire wolves, giant short-faced bears, as well as most of the animals still found in the Great Basin and Mojave Deserts today.
During the Late Precambrian eastern and southern Nevada was being gradually covered by a shallow sea.
During that period northwestern Nevada's sea began to get deeper, gradually becoming an ocean basin.
These deeper water areas of Devonian Nevada were home to drifting animals like graptolites.
Central Nevada was only under shallow water and the eastern and southern parts of the state were characterized by other types of environment.
Contemporary plant fossils from Nevada include "twigs" of petrified wood preserved in Eureka County.
[2] Some of Nevada's Miocene life was preserved in the sediments composing what are now known as the Truckie Beds of the Kawich Mountains northeast of modern Las Vegas.
One site preserved the footprints of a diverse menagerie of creatures including birds, giant sloths, horses, lions, mastodons, and wolves.
These unit record the transition from tidal flats to swamping fluvial environments in southern Nevada during the Triassic.
The Paiute people of northwestern Nevada believe that the region around Lovelock was once home to a race of red haired cannibals they called the Si-Teh-Cahs.
[7] The ancestral Paiutes supposedly killed the Si-Teh-Cahs by trapping them in Lovelock Cave and lighting a huge fire to smother them with the smoke.
Nevertheless, it's possible that some versions of the Paiute legend of the Si-Teh-Cahs described them as giants based on the limb bones of cave bears and mammoths, which are both human-like and common in the Black Rock Desert Area.
The Paiute and Ute people of Nevada were aware of dinosaur footprints in addition to their fossil-derived myths about the Si-Teh-Cahs.
[10] Fossil teratorn remains found in Nevada may have helped inspire other local beliefs in monstrous birds.
In 1882 paleontologists from the National Academy of Sciences identified the tracks as belonging to Pleistocene creatures like birds, horses, lions, mastodons, giant sloths, and wolves.
[1] In 1912 a slab of rock preserving fish, a primitive horse, mollusks, and plants, near Esmeralda Field.
[12] In 1914, Miocene fossils of creatures like freshwater mollusks, mastodons, and rhinoceros were found in the Kawich Mountains northeast of Las Vegas.
In 1930 M. R. Harrington was searching for Pueblo Indian pottery when he serendipitously discovered the skull of a ground sloth in Gypsum Cave in southern Nevada.
The Tule Springs Archaeological Site contains ground sloths, mammoths, prehistoric horses and American camels and the first giant condors in Nevada.
