A New Study of the Looper Collection

Between 1989-1995 Lonnie and Freida Looper hunted for fossils on 19 different gravel bars along the Mississippi River during droughts when the bars became exposed.  These gravel bars are located between Helena, Arkansas and Greenville, Mississippi.  Thousands of years ago, the bones were quickly buried when glacial meltwater pulses flooded the Mississippi River Valley.  The Mississippi River erodes this Pleistocene-aged sediment and deposits the soil and bones on the gravel bars.  For years the Looper family sold replicas of their specimens, but they donated most of the actual specimens to Delta State University.  I don’t think they still sell the replicas, though the Looper’s website remains on the internet.  The Looper family discovered over 550 specimens including 27 species.  A comprehensive study of their collection wasn’t published until 2017.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Looper family found this Jefferson’s ground sloth claw on a Mississippi River gravel bar exposed during a drought.

During most of the late Pleistocene the Mississippi River entered the Mississippi River Valley through 3 gaps, but all of these flooded following the collapse of the ice dam that unleashed the waters of Lake Agassiz about 12,900 years ago.  Before this the Mississippi River didn’t meander broadly like it does today.  Instead, it was a series of braided channels clogged with sandbars because the water table was much lower then.  Cold glacial meltwater pulses caused cool microclimates within the valley that favored mixed Ice Age woodlands of pine, spruce, ash, aspen, oak, hickory, willow, tamarack, herbs, and grass.  Frequently flooded bottomlands and abandoned dried-out channels hosted alder thickets with beech, walnut, tulip, willow, and grass.  Spruce and jack pine dominated drier upland sites.  These were the types of habitats that supported the animal life represented in the Looper collection.  Some of the species they found were not known to have occurred within the Mississippi River Valley including paleolama, stag-moose, helmeted musk-ox, giant short-faced bear, and manatee.

Map of the Mississippi River Valley in relation to the ice sheet during the Last Glacial Maximum. This map doesn’t represent the land area that occupied the continental shelf then.

The Mississippi River resembled this modern day braided river during the Ice Age.

Paleolama mirifica was a species known from the coastal plains of South Carolina and Georgia, and throughout Florida; so the specimen found by the Looper family was a first for the region and evidence for a greater range than was previously known. The manatee was likely an accidental migrant that may have perished because it failed to go south during cool weather.  Manatees can’t survive in water temperatures below 68 degrees F.  The Looper family also collected bones of mammoth, mastodon, bison, white-tailed deer, long-nosed peccary, 2 species of extinct tapir, horse, beaver, giant beaver, Jefferson’s ground sloth, dire wolf, raccoon, black bear, giant tortoise, snapping turtle, soft-shelled turtle, unidentified bird, small-mouth buffalo fish, and flat-headed catfish.  Bones of bison and deer were the most common.

Nina Baghai-Riding, the lead author of this new study, thinks the Mississippi River Valley may have been a migratory corridor for some species.  Cool microclimates along the river may have attracted fauna of northern affinities.  Rivers are also rich in food resources as well because a greater quantity and quality of vegetation can grow in more irrigated environments.  The superior feeding opportunity attracted megafauna as well.

Reference:

Baghai-Riding, Nina; and D. Hunley, C. Beck, and E. Blackwell

“Late Pleistocene Megafauna from Mississippi Alluvium Plain Gravel Bars”

Paludicola December 2017

file:///C:/Users/Owner/AppData/Local/Packages/Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe/TempState/Downloads/Baghai-RidingLatePleistocenegravelbarpaper%20(3).pdf

 

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Tags: Pleistocene fossils in the Mississippi River Valley, The Looper Collection