JOAN CARTAN-HANSEN, HOST: If you want to study about mammoths, there are lots of different career options.

(Science Trek Music) KID ONE: What are you doing?

KID TWO: I'm excavating a wooly mammoth.

KID ONE: A what?

KID TWO: See here.

There're mammoth bones inside this hunk of stone and I'm digging them out.

KID ONE: That's cool.

That make you a paleontologist or an archeologist.

KID TWO: A what?

KID ONE: See here.

SUZANN HENRIKSON: I'm Suzann Henrikson.

I am an archeologist with the Idaho National Laboratory.

CARTAN-HANSEN: Suzanne Henrikson is leading a group of visitors to the Wasden cave site in Eastern Idaho.

HENRIKSON: It was excavated in the 1960s and the 1970s and they dug about 18 feet, 18 to 19 feet of sediments.

And their goal really was to get to the bottom, the floor of the cave.

And on the floor, they found, mammoth long bone mammoth ribs.

They also found, uh, extinct camel, dire wolf, which was an extinct form of wolf that lived during the Pleistocene.

CARTAN-HANSEN: Scientists study bones found in this area to better understand ancient animals like mammoths.

HENRIKSON: A mammoth is an extinct form of elephant that, roamed the Eastern Snake River Plain during the Pleistocene.

But I think it's really important for us to understand that mammoth in this part of southern Idaho, were probably relying on grasses.

The Pleistocene animals that we, that we recover from, from these sites, they do tell us so much about past environments and what types of changes can occur in the environment that will affect whether, you know, an animal survives or not.

CARTAN-HANSEN: With the help of the Museum of Idaho, Henrikson gives tours of this area to help people better understand what scientists do.

HENRIKSON: The original researchers really felt that this mammoth did not end up in the cave naturally, that it, you know, parts of the mammoth were dragged down to the bottom and processed.

Some of the bone was potentially used as stone tools.

And so, what we're doing now is going back and evaluating that original find just to see if there's really truly any evidence that humans and that mammoth are connected.

CARTAN-HANSEN: Henrikson is looking for an answer to a big question: did humans hunt mammoths here?

HENRIKSON: Well, that's one of the biggest research questions in the Desert West.

It, because in the Great Plains across, uh, the other side of the Rocky Mountains, you have mammoth kills that are confirmed as obviously kills by humans.

And you have the stone tools that are associated.

In the Desert West we're still looking for the kill.

You know, we suspect that they happened because we have the same kind of stone tools out here, but we just have not yet found a legitimate mammoth kill by humans.

KID 2: Wait a minute, Humans!

I thought we were talking about Mammoths and fossils.

KID 1: We are.

But Ancient humans left behind bones too.

That's what paleontologists and archaeologists do.

They study different parts of the past.

Archaeologists study historic or prehistoric human culture and Paleontologists study all living things through plants and animal fossils.

KID 2: Okay, So, can I see what a paleontologist does?

KID 1: Sure.

DR.BRANDON PEECOOK: So, some of our most famous fossils, especially animals with backbones vertebrates are animals like the buzz saw shark.

So, this is a humongous, one of the biggest animals on the planet at the time 270 million years ago that has in its lower jaw, almost a circular saw of teeth.

CARTAN-HANSEN: Doctor Brandon Peecook is a paleontologist and assistant curator at the Idaho Museum of Natural History.

On this day, he's searching for fossils in an unlikely place.

PEECOOK: The American Falls Reservoir, these beaches are maybe not the place people expect to find fossils, but it's actually one of the richest places in the whole state of Idaho to find fossils.

These fossils here at this beach are only about a hundred thousand years old, which I know a hundred thousand years is a long time.

Uh, and this is the last time the earth looked like this, an interglacial period.

So, this is probably a horse bone here in the beach that we're gonna put in plaster and take back to the museum.

CARTAN-HANSEN: Paleontologists use a plaster jacket to transport the fossilized bones back to museums to study them.

PEECOOK: So, you gotta kind of find the edges of the one you're looking at, kind of dig down a little bit.

We call this like trenching.

You dig a trench all the way around and then what you end up with is your bone.

Hopefully this is not a great example, but your bone on a pedestal kind of by itself.

Then you plaster jacket it, including some of the rock around the edges.

Hold that all together and then you can get a little more violent and dig your trenches deeper and flip it over.

Perfect!

CARTAN-HANSEN: Back in the museum, the fossils are processed, clean up and ready for review.

Karina Rapp is a museum technician at the Hagerman Horse National Monument.

She knows why it is important to study bones of the past.

KARINA RAPP: So, it allows us to see how change happens and then it allows us to predict change in the future.

PEECOOK: And so, understanding the actual trajectory, the story of who we are and what Idaho has been, I just think is inherently like really important, really wonderful.

And that that's saying nothing about the actual specific scientific questions people can ask and, and joy people can have from really understanding and experiencing these fossils."

KID 2: Well, that was really interesting.

Hey, what did you do?

KID 1: I finished your Mammoth bone, nice, huh?

KID 2: Wait a minute... CARTAN-HANSEN: If you want to learn more about mammoths, check out the Science Trek website.

You'll find it at Science Trek dot org.

(Music) ANNOUNCER: Presentation of Science Trek on Idaho Public Television is made possible through the generous support of the Laura Moore Cunningham Foundation, committed to fulfilling the Moore and Bettis family legacy of building the great state of Idaho.

By the Idaho National Laboratory, mentoring talent and finding solutions for energy and security challenges.

By the Friends of Idaho Public Television and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.