A Castoroides Ulna from the Kansas River

In 1984, an ulna of Castoroides sp., a late Wisconsinan giant beaver, was recovered from a gravel bar of the Kansas River in northeastern Kansas. The bone is complete except for the distal one-third and is larger than than the Earlham college skeleton, a typical Castoroides ohioensis. A specific allocation is impossible at this time. Pleistocene and Holocene mammal remains have been recovered from gravel bars of the Kansas River in eastern Kansas since the nineteenth century. Typical late Pleistocene mammals represented include (Martin et al., 1979): Mammut (mastodon), Cervalces (stag moose), Mylohyus (peccary), Symbos (woodland muskox), and Homo (Martin, pers. comm.). True Pleistocene bison are extremely rare. Holocene mammals collected include: Bison (bison), Cervus (elk), and Odocoileus (white-tailed deer). Most of the Pleistocene fauna is characteristic of the SymbosCervalces faunal province (Martin and Neuner, 1978), a fauna associated with the Pleistocene spruce forests in the eastern United States (Rogers and Martin, 1983). The Holocene fauna appears to cover the full span of the Holocene from the end of the Pleistocene to the present. In addition to the remains of mammals, many projectile points have been found representing a cultural continuum from late Pleistocene cultures to the present (Rogers and Martin, 1983). In recent years, intense collecting, mostly by amateurs, has resulted in an expanded faunal list of vertebrate fossils of the sand and gravel bars of the Kansas River, especially around Bonner Springs. One of the more recent additions is the giant beaver, Castoroides sp., represented by an ulna (see Fig. 1) found by Stanley Rasmussen in February 1984. The bone was found lying completely exposed on the surface of a sandbar on the south bank of the river approximately one kilometer west of Bonner Springs. The circumstances of the discovery were typical: very few of the mammalian remains of the Kansas River are found in situ. Giant beavers were up to three meters in length and weighed up to 220 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.177 on Wed, 16 Nov 2016 04:23:46 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 114 TRANSACTIONS OF THE KANSAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE