(Martha Hayden | Utah Geological Survey) Crowds of people come to watch the Huntington Mammoth get excavated, August 1988.
Josh Lively isn’t the world’s biggest hockey fan.
But early this year, the eastern Utah man knew he had to get to Salt Lake City for an NHL game.
Utah Hockey Club was holding a vote among fans to help pick the team’s new name and Lively had a strong opinion.
The paleontologist and his coworkers want to see the club called the Utah Mammoth.
It is, after all, a subject they know more than a little about.
The phone rang around 7 a.m. on a balmy August morning in 1988.
Workers at a construction site for a dam near Fairview in Huntington Canyon had been using heavy machinery to dig through a 20-foot-thick muck, pulling up branches and logs.
But then they found something else entirely.
“All of a sudden they pulled one up and that wasn‘t a log — that was a tusk,” said Martha Hayden, now a paleontology assistant at the Utah Geological Survey.
Hayden and her boss, the late Utah State Paleontologist David Gillette, got into the car for the 90-minute drive to the site. The two examined the exposed bones upon arrival. One was 4 feet long and 8 inches around. There was also a section of a tusk that would have been about 10 feet long had it been completely preserved.
(Martha Hayden | Utah Geological Survey) Bones dug up of the Huntington Mammoth at the site near Fairview, August 1988.
They quickly realized it was a mammoth.
And it looked like a nearly full skeleton.
“It was very cool,” Hayden said.
During the five-day excavation process, some of Utah’s first mammoth fans flocked to the site in the Manti-LaSal National Forest.
“We probably had close to 1,000 people a day, once the word got out, just come,” Hayden remembered.
By the time Hayden and her team were done, what is now known as the Huntington Mammoth had been revealed. About 95% of the animal’s skeleton was recovered, a rare discovery. At the time, it was also the highest elevation (about 9,000 feet) that a Columbian mammoth’s remains had ever been found.
It put Utah on the map as a mammoth state.
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah Hockey Club celebrates their victory over the Calgary Flames during the game at the Delta Center in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, April 1, 2025.
“The Huntington Mammoth is arguably the most famous mammoth from Utah,” said Lively, curator of paleontology at the USU Eastern Prehistoric Museum, where the Huntington Mammoth now lives. “But mammoths were all over the state. They pop out in the gravel along the Bonneville shorelines in Salt Lake and Utah County all the time.”
It makes sense, then, that Mammoth is a top-three finalist for the official name of Utah’s new NHL franchise.
After its excavation, the race was on for the local museums to secure the original Huntington Mammoth for their collections. Whoever could get nationally accredited first would get the skeleton.
The Utah State University Eastern Prehistoric Museum won out, and casts of the Huntington Mammoth were made and distributed to other museums in the state.
And the discoveries did not stop after the excavation.
A unique part of the Huntington Mammoth is that its bones are not fossilized, Lively said. That allowed scientists to study the remains in different ways.
“Folks recognized that that would give scientists the opportunity to look for DNA,” Lively said. “It turns out the Huntington Mammoth was the first Columbian mammoth on the planet to have its genome sequenced. It’s a really big deal that this small-town mammoth here in Utah is internationally recognized as the first to have its genome sequenced.”
(Martha Hayden | Utah Geological Survey) A sign at the site of where the Huntington Mammoth was found and excavated.
Scientists found woolly mammoth DNA in the genome sequence. It was believed that the woolly mammoth and Columbian mammoth diverged around a million years ago. But the woolly mammoth’s DNA in the Columbian mammoth’s genome showed the two did, or at least could, interbreed.
“Something that you would not be able to learn just studying the skeleton alone,” Lively said. “That really changed the way we think about species in the fossil record.”
Why were the Huntington Mammoth’s bones preserved so well? It may, Lively said, have something to do with where it died and the sediment in which it was then buried. The mammoths found along the Wasatch Front are in gravel and coarse-grained sands that let groundwater easily move through the system and alter the bones. The Huntington Mammoth, however, was preserved in a small pond deposit that was essentially clay.
(Martha Hayden | Utah Geological Survey) Martha Hayden works to excavate the Huntington Mammoth at the site near Fairview, August 1988.
“It was a really old individual so you could see these things like arthritis, his teeth were wearing out so he couldn‘t really eat and he was trapped in a very high-elevation bog deposit so he was probably really old and he just got trapped in some mud and died right there,” Hayden said.
While the Huntington Mammoth may be the most talked about in Utah, the animal’s remains have been found in about 30 different places around the state, Hayden said. The shoreline of the ancient Lake Bonneville is a common location where mammoth tusks, teeth and bones have been scattered.
“Probably the most common way they’d find fossils of mammoths is in some of the gravel pits. Up by Wasatch Boulevard and various places where they’re mining to get aggregate from those sand and gravel deposits that were associated with the lakes — that’s where they often run into fossils,” said Don DeBlieux, who serves as Utah’s assistant state paleontologist.
(Martha Hayden | Utah Geological Survey) The Huntington Mammoth skeleton in the muck at the construction site, August 1988.
More than a few regular Utahns have come across mammoth remains over the years.
In the 1900s, Orem expanded its water system, which required digging trenches to connect new homes.
On a November day in 1937, homeowner Daniel Thomas began digging his trench and happened upon a large tooth. University of Utah archaeologists were brought in for further excavation and it turned out to be the remains of a hairy mammoth.
Almost 60 years later, Millville residents Ed and Linda Gledhill had their own run-in with mammoth remains. The couple was walking around the shoreline of Bear Lake on Labor Day weekend 1992 when they came across a jawbone and several teeth. The then-state archaeologist David Madsen was brought in, and eventually, 14 bone fragments of a baby mammoth that died 10,000 to 15,000 years ago were uncovered.
(Jay Drowns | The Herald Journal) State archeologist David Madsen examines the jawbone of the baby mammoth, March 1993.
Each discovery fuels the imagination of Utah scientists.
“It would be kind of cool if you could go back in your time machine and just cruise around Lake Bonneville. It would have been amazing. It was bigger than all of the Great Lakes combined,” DeBlieux said. “I’m sure the shore was pretty cool with glaciers coming down into it out of Big and Little Cottonwood Canyon and all these giant mammals cruising around.”
Instead, DeBlieux might have to settle for a frozen rink in downtown Salt Lake City.
(Jay Drowns | The Herald Journal) A crew from the Antiquities Section of the Utah State historical Society digs on the edge of Bear Lake, March 1993.
After calling the team “Utah Hockey Club” in its inaugural season, Smith Entertainment Group conducted a survey to find a new name for the franchise. The finalists are Utah Outlaws, Utah Hockey Club and Utah Mammoth.
An official announcement is expected before the start of the 2025-26 season.
“We’re definitely in the home stretch and on track to announce that in the coming months here,” team president Chris Armstrong said.
Utah’s paleontologists know their preference.
Lively, for one, is on board with “Utah Mammoth” taking the ice next season in Salt Lake City.
For Hayden, the mammoth would be more than just a mascot. Everyone loves learning about dinosaurs and fossils, she said, but Hayden would be happy to give the mammoth and paleontology some spotlight on the NHL stage.
“It is not a field that is very well-funded, so that kind of P.R., things like [having a team named the mammoth], I think is good,” Hayden said.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah Hockey Club center Nick Schmaltz (8) celebrates a goal as Utah Hockey Club hosts the Tampa Bay Lightning, NHL hockey at the Delta Center in Salt Lake City on Saturday, March 22, 2025.
DeBlieux, who grew up in the hockey hotbed of Massachusetts, said he hadn’t paid much attention to the NHL until the Utah Hockey Club arrived in town. DeBlieux was excited for the franchise, he said, and has tuned in for some games.
He hopes to go to Delta Center next year, perhaps with a mammoth logo at center ice.
He wouldn’t even make a fuss if the team got the logo wrong.
The potential logo Smith Entertainment Group showed fans earlier this year looks like a woolly mammoth. The Columbian mammoths that once roamed Utah looked more like modern elephants, DeBlieux said.
“I think most people think of the woolly mammoth — the long hair and that kind of thing,” DeBlieux said. “But down here, it would‘ve been more temperate. End of the ice ages and stuff, so they probably didn‘t have as long of fur.”
Though maybe they’d need an extra layer at the rink.
“I think you can take a little bit of poetic license,” DeBlieux said. “I would do it too, probably. It would look a lot cooler.”
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