Living with Mammoths: Lessons from the Ice Age

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live amongst Mammoths? Mason Hintermeister is a club member who spent the summer doing just that as part of an Education Internship at the 140,000 year old Mammoth Site of Hot Springs, South Dakota. In this talk, he will describe how more than 50 mammoths met their end in an area half the size of a football field, explain why a museum was built over them, and tell how the internship allowed him and the other interns to use educational programming to bring the Ice Age alive for hundreds of visitors of all ages. In addition, he will talk about what he learned from the experience and what life was like in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

Bio: Mason Hintermeister is a Maryland born and raised undergraduate student at Stony Brook University majoring in Human Evolutionary Biology and Anthropology with a specialization in Field Methods. Though he now studies the evolution of East African primates using 3D morphometric technology in the Functional Morphology Lab, as a volunteer of the Calvert Marine Museum he studied the marine vertebrate fossils of the east coast. He has presented research on Maryland’s Cretaceous sharks and still works on fossil sharks as part of an undergraduate research internship for the Scientist in Every Florida School (SEFS) Sharks and Artificial Intelligence Professional Development Program at the Thompson Earth Systems Institute of the University of Florida.