BEMIDJI — As the Beaver men’s hockey team took on Ferris State in a two-day series last week, paleontologists with the Science Museum of Minnesota lobbied fans to help them make the mascot’s ancestor an official state fossil.
The giant beaver roamed the Upper Midwest in the Pleistocene epoch, what is commonly referred to as the last ice age. Like many ice age mammals, the reason for its extinction is unknown, but entire skeletons of the mammal have been found in Minnesota.
“These animals are going to be where their environment would have been in this state,” said Science Museum of Minnesota’s paleontology lab manager Nicole Dzenowski.
Fossils of the giant beaver have been found in the Twin Cities metro area and in Freeborn County, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t roam what are now more rural places.
"You just have more people who are going to be running into it during construction,” Dzenowski said. “We have a fossil from somebody digging up their flower garden in the Twin Cities area.
"Realistically, most of the big fossil finds — dinosaur or even other kinds of fossils — are found by people living in rural areas who stumble upon it on their own land and then get in contact with paleontologists.”
Dzenowski said she fields about five calls a week on possible fossils, and while most of the time it’s just a rock, some larger finds have been found from fielding citizen calls.
“In Wyoming, Minnesota, there was a call a couple of years ago where somebody found part of a bison,” she said. “We went and dug up — actually, pulled out of a river — the majority of a bison, a juvenile and another adult.”
Excitement around paleontology is behind the push for the giant beaver’s increased status as a state fossil, which wasn’t even originally considered.
“We initially had eight candidates we put forward,” Dzenowski said. The contenders included an ancient bison, a scimitar-toothed cat and the crow shark.
“We had so many people write in giant beaver that we included it, and the giant beaver was the winner whenever we allowed people to vote.”
Over 11,000 people from across the state participated in the state fossil vote, including schoolchildren in all 87 Minnesota counties.
Minnesota is one of only a few states that doesn’t have a state fossil. As Minnesota schoolchildren learn all about the state bird — the common loon — or the state flower — the showy lady slipper —the giant beaver as a state fossil could be an educational tool for exploring ancient Minnesota.
“Modern beavers are huge ecosystem engineers, they’re huge parts of the environment and these guys were as well,” Dzenowski said. “They were interacting with the first peoples in Minnesota.”
Approximately the size of a small bear, the giant beaver weighed about 200 pounds, compared to its smaller, modern 100-pound relative.
“One of the things we’re trying to put forth is not just the giant beaver or Castoreides [ohioensis], we’ve also got the Dakota name 'Ċapa' and then 'Amik,' the Ojibwe name, for the giant beaver.”
The Science Museum of Minnesota asks Minnesotans to contact their legislators for the giant beaver’s inclusion as a state fossil this session.
