Fossil Camel Discovered in Oklahoma by Oil Workers

As the rush intensifies to find new reserves of fossil fuels, digs throughout the West are yielding another byproduct — fossils.

Oilfield workers in western Oklahoma have unearthed deposits of fossils containing extinct species of camel and horse, along with as-yet-uncounted other animals, while excavating a new well, Oklahoma City’s The Oklahoman reports.

An earthmover uncovered the fossilized bones in July after removing 6 meters of soil in the state-run Packsaddle Wildlife Management Area.

Paleontologists brought to the scene identified 13 separate fossil deposits, which have tentatively been dated as far back as 5 million to 12 million years.

Among the identifiable remains so far are the skull a small, primitive horse and the bones of a camel — a mammal that actually originated in the very ancient American West, according to Kyle Davies, a fossil preparator with the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History.

“You don’t associate camels with North America, and yet in the fossil record there’s quite a number of camels,” he told The Oklahoman.

“It actually shows that North America was the origin point for camels, and they spread out from here.”

The fossils date to the Miocene epoch, a particularly formative period for the Ancient West that spanned from about 23 million to 5.3 million years ago. This is when the massive Sierra Nevada and Cascade Mountain ranges first formed, and when what are now the Great Plains sat as their own continent, with life that would seem familiar — but misplaced — compared to today’s Western biota.

Fossil Camel Discovered in Oklahoma by Oil Workers