I wrote The Last Mammoth, Hungry Man, and the Short Faced Bear when I realized that the mammoth remains found at the top of Huntington Canyon, not far from where I grew up in Utah, might just have been the actual last Columbian Mammoth ever to walk the Earth. I’ve checked out this theory with interviews with the original investigator, Don Burge, at the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum in Price, Utah. CEU has custody of the actual, unfossilized bones. Of course, being a scientist, Don cautioned me that you can never “prove a negative” that there was not a more recent one, but he didn’t know of one.

The Huntington Mammoth is such a complete and perfect specimen that it has been turned into a real export item by the College of Eastern Utah. The Huntington Mammoth is probably the best mammoth specimen anywhere in the world. Don told me that museums in Asia, America, and Europe all use copies of the Huntington Mammoth as their “display” mammoth. If you visit the Mammoth Museum in Hot Springs, South Dakota, you’ll see a copy of the Huntington Mammoth right there at the entrance. The Huntington Mammoth greets you in the lobby at the Falls of the Ohio State Park. In all, Don Burge said that eighteen copies of the HuntingtonMammoth can be seen in world museums.

One of the copies is at the Fairview Museum in the pretty little farming community of Fairview, Utah. The Fairview Museum a few blocks east of the highway has built a new addition for their pioneer museum to showcase the Huntington Mammoth. He faces high windows looking toward the mountains where he died. It’s a dramatic display that may be the best one in any museum.

If you drive from Fairview to Price across the mountains, you’ll pass right by the actual discovery site. The Forest Service has a nice roadside display telling you about the find there. Check the map below. (Click to enlarge.)

A sculpture of the Short-faced Bear has recently been added to the Eccles Dinosaur Park in Ogden, Utah as added recognition of this remarkable find.

If you visit the discovery site in that green mountain meadow at the top of Huntington Canyon, visualize what it must have been like when the last mammoth in North America died. The landscape was the same, but perhaps colder with more snow and ice. Was he being hunted by the earliest humans, or simply trying to find something to eat? Was he being chased by the ferocious Short-faced Bear?