Free Republic

The waterway’s decline poses an existential threat to Elephant Butte, N.M., and surrounding farms. ‘This place is going to turn into a ghost town.’ ELEPHANT BUTTE, N.M.—Three decades ago, a rare event drew hundreds of people from miles away to the Elephant Butte reservoir, this state’s largest lake. The reservoir, which supplied drinking water to thousands and nourished vast acres of farmland, had swelled from the Rio Grande and begun to overflow. Jim Paxon remembers the roar as water cascaded down the dam’s spillway, tossing mist into the air and churning the ground below. Those days are long gone. One...

Elephant Butte is a small city in New Mexico that calls itself the “Diamond in the Desert.” As KRQE News 13 reports, it was in this scenic location that a group of friends celebrating a bachelor party made an astonishing find – a giant fossil of the tusk and skull of what’s believed to be a Stegomastodon. According to the University of Nebraska State Museum, Stegomastodons were, “the last surviving member of a lineage of primitive tuskers called ‘gomphotheres’ which first entered North America 15 million years ago.”