Missouri mastodons, mammoths and tigers, oh my!

Years before it became cool to study the prehistory of climate’s affect on flora and fauna,
W. Ray Wood had delved into research on the changing ecosystems.

Ray Wood of the Department of Anthropology has to think a minute when asked his age. "It used to be important," the 70-something professor emeritus says.

Wood studies ecosystems that date back two million years, so taken in the perspective of those Ice Age accounts, a few decades of recent time may not seem all that important.

For his research spanning 50 years, Wood received a Distinguished Career Award from the American Quaternary Association (AMQUA) at its 2008 meeting. The award honors a scientist who contributes significantly and continuously to the advancement of Quaternary science, which seeks to understand the past 2 million years.

A project that Wood organized in 1964 still stands as a model for interdisciplinary research. With support from the National Science Foundation, Wood gathered a team of more than 16 archaeologists, zoologists, botanists, palynologists, vertebrate paleontologists, geochronologists, soil scientists and other experts that became known for rewriting the paleoecology of Missouri.

The group's study of the archaeology and paleoecology of the Western Ozarks resulted in some astonishing discoveries of megafauna, which Wood's refers to as "the big guys." The researchers found Ice Age critters such as mastodons, giant ground sloths as large as small elephants, mammoths, the earliest bison in the hemisphere, an alligator tooth and beavers about the size of a brown bear.

"It was an exciting time," Wood says. "We worked out a paleoecology record for the Ozarks dating back some 70,000 years." The group, named the Western Ozarks Research Consortium, spent 14 years on the project and produced a new view of the paleoecology of the state.

People traditionally had thought Missouri's vegetation hadn't changed much in several million years. Wood's consortium, however, discovered that mastodons had been roaming spruce forests in Missouri — forests that no longer exist. Climate change has pushed back the most southern spruce forests to southern Canada, Wood says.

Thanks to the consortium's work, scientists from throughout the United States now can access the research and view the fossils. The specimens are housed in the Illinois State Museum.

Wood says the specialists contributed as a team and as individuals. "The research was always more important to us than individual achievement," he says. Each researcher published his or her own study and contributed to the research plan. "We worked it all out together, and we're all friends today."

Recognized as one of the foremost authorities on Plains prehistory, Wood gives no indication that he is retired. His daily schedule is filled with research that continues to center on the Ozark Highland and the Great Plains, including prehistoric studies and ethnohistory, especially of the Plains village Indians.

Wood has written much on the early fur trade on the northern Plains and has produced several atlases of early maps of the mid-continent and Plains that appeal to scholars in several disciplines. His next book, on a fur-trading fort at Fort Clark, N.D., will be published in 2010.

Wood has been editor of The Missouri Archaeologist, the journal of the Missouri Archaeological Society, since 1990.

In a nomination letter for the AMQUA award, R. Bruce McMillan, director of the Illinois State Museum, summed up the extent of Wood's career by calling him an "eminently productive scholar."

Links:

W. Raymond Wood
Department of Anthropology

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