page_title: White Sands National Park
section_title: Paleontology
hierarchical_section_title: White Sands National Park / Paleontology
caption_attribution_description: English: Paleontological landscape painting, White Sands National Park, United States, featuring six species of extinct Ice Age mammals - Columbian mammoths, a Harlan's ground sloth (left background), dire wolves (left foreground), American lions (center/left background), camelops (right background), and saber-toothed cats (right foreground, in reeds) - and a few other small creatures such as a rabbit, owl and two black birds.
context_page_description: White Sands National Park is an American national park located in the state of New Mexico on U.S. Route 70 approximately 15 miles southwest of Alamogordo and 52 miles northeast of Las Cruces, in western Otero County and northeastern Doña Ana County. The park is situated at an average elevation of about 4,000 feet in the Tularosa Basin and comprises the southern part of a 275 sq mi field of white sand dunes composed of gypsum crystals. The gypsum dunefield is the largest of its kind on Earth.
  The park was originally designated White Sands National Monument on January 18, 1933 by President Herbert Hoover, and redesignated as a national park when Congress passed the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act on December 20, 2019. The park encompasses 145,762 acres protecting 115 sq mi of the dunefield, about 41%, while the remaining 160 sq mi are located to the north within White Sands Missile Range. The depth of gypsum sand across the entire field is about 30 feet below the interdunal surface, while the tallest dunes are about 60 feet high. About 4.5 billion short tons of gypsum sand fill the dunefield, which formed about 7,000–10,000 years ago.
context_section_description: Before the Pleistocene epoch ended about 12,000 years ago, the land within the Tularosa Basin featured large lakes, streams, and grasslands. The climate was wetter and cooler, producing a lot more rain and snow than in the present. Lake Otero was one of the largest lakes in the southwest, covering 1,600 square miles (4,144 km²), which is an area larger than the state of Rhode Island.
  The basin teemed with life, including large ice age mammals that lived by the shores of Lake Otero and in the surrounding grasslands. Columbian mammoths, ground sloths, ancient camels, dire wolves, lions, and saber-toothed cats—also known as saber-toothed tigers, though not closely related to tigers—all crossed the Tularosa Basin where the dunes lie presently. The animals left fossil footprints as they walked the muddy shores of Lake Otero, their body weight compressing the wet clay and gypsum. The fragile tracks are uncovered by the wind, then rapidly erode away, with many tracks disappearing after only two years.
  Scattered along the now dried lakebed are trackways of ancient camels and Columbian mammoths. The fossilized footprints appear to gather around ancient pools of water. For 80 years, only a small collection of fossil footprints had been found in the park; however, a group of scientists noticed dark spots dotting the expanse of the lakebed that appeared to be footprints. During the 2010s, footprints of a dire wolf were discovered beside ancient seeds dated to more than 18,000 years ago. The fossil footprints of ground sloths have also been found in the park. Paleolithic human footprints are sometimes found interacting with Ice Age animals. One set of footprints shows the stalking of sloths. The paleo-humans who lived in the Tularosa Basin left behind no other evidence of their passage. Though stone flakes from toolmaking, arrowheads, and spear points are found in surrounding areas, they are the artifacts of humans who lived after the Ice Age. The lakebed is nearly devoid of a single artifact from before the Spanish exploration in the 1500s.
caption: A herd of Columbian mammoths, a ground sloth (left background), dire wolves (left foreground), lions (center/left background), camels (right background), and saber-toothed cats (right foreground, in reeds) gather at a water source
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