Seventy million years ago, the area that is now Elbert County was 600 feet beneath a sea.
Get a glimpse of what it may have looked like in the “Prehistoric Kiowa” exhibit, showing now at the Elbert County Museum.
Fourteen scientific renderings illuminate the area’s distant past and changing landscape, and mark the 10-year anniversary of drilling of the Kiowa Core to learn more about Denver’s geological history.
In 1999, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science — helped by a grant from the National Science Foundation — drilled 2,256 feet into the solid rock beneath the Elbert County Fairgrounds. It took four months of round-the-clock drilling to produce nearly a half-mile of core samples, or ancient layers of rock.
The “Kiowa Core” has since produced hundreds of scientific studies and research articles, revealing leaf samples, and pollen, marine and animal fragments that date back 300 million years.
“It’s amazing what has happened over the eons and how many different landscapes have existed in one place,” says Carol Beam, a volunteer at the Elbert County Museum. The exhibit includes a section about the drilling, extraction and analysis of the core samples, as well as large artistic panels based on the findings.
Each image offers a peek into the past, ranging from vast sand dunes from 250 million years ago, to an image of a pterodactyl — essentially a flying lizard with a 25-foot wing span — soaring over the Western Interior Seaway to hunt for fish around 70 millions years ago.
Though the findings from the Kiowa Core have prompted multiple exhibits elsewhere, this one was created for the local community.
“Kiowa was chosen (for the drilling) because it is in the center of the deepest set of layers in the Denver basin,” Beam says. “There has never been an exhibit here in the county where it was done.”
“Prehistoric Kiowa” also features many found items brought in by the local ranching community. Museum volunteers and staff put the word out earlier this summer as the exhibit opened, and interesting fossils started to trickle in.
“We found ancient shell-like structures that are actually algae fossils,” says Beam. “And one family brought in a mammoth jawbone with the lower grinding tooth intact.”
The mammoth fossil was discovered just south of Kiowa by Otto Maul, a farmer plowing his fields in 1945. Another find came from a Boy Scout camp nearby after a troop discovered a partial skull and jaw from a Titanothere — a giant rhinoceros-like animal that became extinct about 34 million years ago.
“The Kiowa Core is perhaps the most meaningful scientific effort the Denver Museum has produced,” Beam says. “It will continue to provide valuable information for the next hundred years.”
“Prehistoric Kiowa”
Where: The Elbert County Museum, 515 Comanche St., Kiowa.
When: The museum is open from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Thursdays; from noon to 4 p.m. Saturdays; and from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sundays through Sept. 6; and by appointment for group and school tours through October.
Details: Call 303-621-2088 or visit .
