On the way to San Jose during a bike ride on the trails, Bill and I discovered Lupe the Mammoth that roamed the very same territory that would later become known as Silicon Valley.
Bill and I can’t take full credit for the discovery, though:-)
It turns out in the summer of 2005, citizen scientist Roger Castillo discovered the skull of a Columbian mammoth while walking his dog, Jenna along the Guadalupe River near the San Jose airport. So actually, it was Jenna who really deserves the credit. Paleontologists from UC Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology conducted the excavation, and discovered a thigh bone and the pelvis of the juvenile mammoth along the river,
affectionately called Lupe. Though now distinct, it is believed that Lupe would have roamed the valley 14,000 years ago.
You can stand besides a 10-foot tall full size replica indoors at the Children’s Discovery Museum when they open back up, or in front of a model of a fully grown 13-foot mammoth with it’s large tusks outdoors, where Bill and I shamelessly posed for a photo-op. It is hard to believe that that around the time the mammoth roamed the valley, that saber tooth tigers, ground sloths and condors were also roamed where the titans of the tech industry currently cast their wide footprints.
