A River of Bones
Along the Peace River in northwestern Alberta, the past is constantly eroding into the present. Here, riverbanks expose a dense concentration of fossils known as the Peace River Bonebed. This is not a single location, but a series of sites where the remains of Ice Age megafauna are found. The fossils primarily date to the end of the Pleistocene epoch, roughly 10,000 to 13,000 years ago.
The collection of animals reads like a roll-call of North American giants. Paleontologists have identified remains from woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius), ancient horses (Equus sp.), and the western camel (Camelops hesternus). One of the most striking residents was the giant beaver, Castoroides ohioensis. This rodent was the size of a black bear, reaching up to 2.2 meters in length and weighing between 90 and 125 kilograms. Its incisors alone could be 15 centimeters long. The bones are typically found jumbled and disarticulated, washed out from the sediments of the late Cretaceous Wapiti Formation and overlying Ice Age deposits. This indicates they were likely transported by water before being buried.
The Human Connection
The Peace River Bonebed contains the remains of extinct animals. Intermixed with the fossilized bones are stone artifacts from early First Nations peoples. This co-occurrence of human tools and megafauna bones provides direct evidence that people inhabited this landscape alongside these giant creatures. They were contemporaries in a world that was rapidly changing at the end of the last glacial period.
The presence of these artifacts suggests a hunter-prey relationship. For Paleo-Indian groups, a mammoth or a giant bison would have represented a significant source of food and materials. The evidence at Peace River helps explain of the peopling of the Americas and the factors that led to the end-Pleistocene extinction event, which saw the disappearance of most large land animals in North America. Ongoing research, supported by institutions like the local Peace Region Palaeontology Research Centre and the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, continues to uncover the details of this shared history.