Mastodons on the Loose: How a new public art project is connecting Muskegon to its history—and future

Community News |Feb 20, 2019|1 min read

With the constant hum of construction happening in Muskegon, it can be easy to become absorbed by this quickly changing world of ours: the buildings being erected, the renovations, the debuting businesses. And while this melange of jackhammering and ribbon cuttings is very much about a growing economy, about the future, it’s also inevitably tied to the past, to a history spanning hundreds of millions of years.

 

Here, against a backdrop of emerging restaurants and coffee shops, is a landscape that tells the stories of ancient seas, of mile-thick ice that once covered our state, of long-extinct animals like mastodons and mammoths and giant beavers. It is a story of continental glaciers that encompassed the land we now call Michigan for more than a million years, of the sand and other sediments that, after centuries of being blown by the wind, have become the dunes framing our beaches.

 

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