6/11/18 – Beringia Interpretive Centre

George chose the first museum of the day; I got to choose the second.  Located right next door to the Transportation Museum and the Whitehorse Airport, the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre is easy to get to.  It’s also easy to recognize even from the highway because there’s a family of woolly mammoths standing out by the parking lot, not something you see many places along the Alaska Highway.

Along the path and through the woods is another animal you can’t ever see anymore—a giant beaver.  I had to hang onto him to get him to stand still so George could take our picture.

We followed the path to a building that looks like it’s not finished yet, although my guess is that the yellow arches are supposed to signify woolly mammoth tusks or scimitar cat teeth.

 

Just inside the door is a giant globe.  I was standing there looking at it and a very nice docent came over, asked if I’d like some information on what I was looking at.  I said yes and he started explaining about The Last Great Ice Age. (I could tell he was capitalizing and italicizing each word as he said it.  He was really enthused about this museum and his job!) 

I didn’t stand in the right place to take the picture, but there’s a land bridge between North America and Asia that remained uncovered by glaciers during the Ice Age. This sub-continent of eastern Siberia, Alaska and Yukon was named “Beringia”, after the Bering Sea.  It was cold but didn’t get a lot of precipitation.  Without precipitation you don’t get snow and ice.  Without snow and ice, animals can live on the grassy  tundra.

Skeletons of prehistoric mammals have been found all over the area.  The most impressive is the woolly mammoth. I don't know if we're most impressed by big extinct animals because they're big or because they're extinct.  

I don’t think I’d ever heard of the Giant Short-Faced Bear.  He was bigger than a grizzly and probably would have not have been impressed with bear spray.

The docent told us that some fossil bones of a big ground sloth had been sent to then VP Thomas Jefferson.  The future president not only thought the old bones and claws were from a lion, but he didn't believe in species going extinct and thought these critters were still wandering around the continent. When he sent Louis & Clark out exploring in 1802, he asked them specifically to look for live animals.  The docent credits the Jefferson's ground sloth with the expansion of the US.  I don't know if that's valid, but Lewis & Clark probably weren't looking forward to dealing with an animal this size, one who probably didn't move as slowly as today's smaller sloths who didn't make it onto the Extinct List.  

Beringia didn't have saber-tooth tigers. The region's big cat is called a "Scimitar Cat".  They mounted the bones, and then reconstructed what they think he might have looked like.  I think paleontologists have finally admitted that they haven’t a clue whether the big cats had stripes. This one seems to have both--as well as very large teeth.

We watched a video—but I think I would have enjoyed talking to the docent longer. We had talked about other fossil beds we'd seen during our travels.  He was excited that we'd been to Idaho and actually seen a Hagerman horse fossil. 

I really enjoyed this museum—although I think we missed a section. The brochure I picked up said there were frozen ice-age carcasses uncovered by gold miners, and there were exhibits of paleontologists’ work in northern Yukon.  I don’t remember seeing any of that so I would go again, but George probably won’t want to when we go back through Whitehorse.

The pictures are here: Beringia Interpretive Centre