Bones of 700-year-old bison on display in Burnet County museum
Nearly complete skeleton found in 2013 along Rocky Creek.
For hundreds of years, “Rockie” was lying under several feet of dirt along the banks of a creek in Burnet County. Now she has found a final resting place.
Parts of the skeleton of the female bison, who lived about 700 years ago, are on display at the Falls on the Colorado Museum in Marble Falls. A University of Texas paleontologist has just started cleaning and stabilizing the rest of the bones not on display to keep them from crumbling, said Darlene Oostermeyer, the museum chairwoman.
“We have 90 to 93 percent of the skeleton, except for some leg bones,” Oostermeyer said.
The museum has raised more than $8,000 and needs to raise about $5,000 more to pay for the bones to be stabilized and put together so more of Rockie’s skeleton can be displayed, said Tom Hester, a retired UT anthropology professor and a member of the museum’s board.
Ryan Murray, a health information manager for Austin Gastroenterology, found the bison in 2013 on his parents’ ranch in northeastern Burnet County after he saw a piece of bone sticking out of the banks of Rocky Creek.
Murray, his father, his brother and David Calame, an archaeology enthusiast from South Texas, excavated an almost complete bison skeleton, including teeth, over a nine-month period. He named the bison after Rocky Creek and kept the bones at his house before lending them to the museum this spring.
“I thought it was better off for people to be able to see it on display rather than cooped up in my study,” he said.
Hester said what Murray found was unusual.
“It’s very rare to find an isolated bison skeleton like this one to be as complete as it is,” he said.
Usually people just find a few pieces of bison bones that have been cut up by hunters and gatherers hundreds of years ago, he said. He said Rockie was a mature female when she died but that it isn’t clear how she died. She would have weighed between 1,300 and 1,400 pounds, he said.
Radiocarbon dating shows that Rockie lived in Texas sometime between 1308 and 1424 A.D., the Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Texas in San Antonio has said.
During that time — an archaeological time frame called the Toyah interval — bison were pretty common in Texas.
Murray said he has sent some of Rockie’s bones across the country for research, including a study done by Project Bison run by a doctoral student at Texas A&M University. The study compares leg bones of bison from different time periods to see how the animals adapted to rapid climate change.