What could have left a mysterious set of footprints in Oregon? I'm Adam from Ripleys.com and this is your Weird Minute. Gregory Rettelak, a professor at the University of Oregon, was taking his students out to Fossil Lake, instructing them to spread out and look around. The lake bed holds specimens from the past 646,000 years, including birds, fish, mollusks, camels and sloths. Surveying his students, he noticed a series of large impressions in the lake bed.
remarking that they looked like mammoth tracks. He was right. The roughly frisbee-sized impressions were covered in just a light layer of dust, but extended for 117 mammoth-sized paces. The tracks were left by four adult Colombian mammoths, a juvenile and an infant 43,000 years ago. While mammoth skeletons have been found in relative abundance,
We've never been able to learn much about their behavior, and usually assume they acted similar to elephants, but the tracks reveal something important. Mammoths traveled in family units. For more strange stories, visit ripleys.com, rate The Weird Minute if you haven't already, and tune in tomorrow for another Minute of Odds.