NORFOLK — Thousands of years ago, Hampton Roads was rife with bizarre, enormous creatures. Saber-toothed cats, giant beavers, ground sloths and mastodons roamed the area, according to Alec Zaborniak, non-live collections manager with the Virginia Living Museum.
Now, the remains of a humongous ice age animal have been found near a spot that thousands of motorists drive past every day. Workers recently unearthed around a dozen pieces of a mastodon skeleton while digging at the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel expansion project.
“This is the stuff they don’t teach in engineering school,” said Ryan Banas, project director.
Soon, residents and travelers will be able to view the bones and other artifacts at a new project visitor’s center in Norfolk.
Workers at the project got very lucky discovering the bones in the fall of 2023, Banas said. A worker noticed something odd while looking at a conveyor belt at the slurry treatment plant, which is located on the project’s South Island.
Banas said the plant moves fast, processing 16,000 gallons of slurry a minute.
“So, the fact that we had one of our staff members that was able to catch a glimpse is pretty, pretty darn impressive,” Banas said.
The bones, which are anywhere from 12,000 to 50,000 years old, include ribs, vertebrae, a tooth the size of a small hand and part of a limb, Banas said.
Back then, lower sea levels meant the land near the HRBT would have likely been a forest, said Zaborniak, making it a perfect foraging ground for the mastodons.
Very similar in appearance to wooly mammoths or modern-day elephants, the creatures spent much of their day looking for food, he said. They were anywhere from 7 to 10 feet tall with large tusks and weighed around 6 tons.
Elephants and mammoths had flat teeth built for chomping down on grass, Zaborniak said.
“Mastodons, on the other hand, have very large ridges on their teeth, which are great for browsing,” he said. “So these animals are going to be eating plants such as leaves, pine needles and fruits.”
There is some evidence of social behavior, he said, but it’s likely male mastodons were solitary creatures. The animals had a wide range across North America, he added. Early humans also would have potentially crossed paths with them, he said, but it would have taken several people to hunt one.
Other mastodon bones have been found in Hampton Roads: the Virginia Living Museum possesses much of a skeleton that was discovered in Yorktown over a period of several years, according to a previous report by The Virginian-Pilot.
The $3.9 billion HRBT expansion project will double the road’s capacity, from two to four lanes in each direction, and add two two-lane tunnels. It is scheduled for completion in 2027.
Similar construction work elsewhere in the region has also turned up interesting historical finds. In 2023, workers on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel expansion project dug up an old ship anchor buried beneath the shipping channel. Work was delayed for several months, and resumed in April, so the 10-foot anchor could be excavated.
HRBT project spokesperson Paula Miller said the mastodon discovery was not expected to delay that project’s construction timeline.
Other artifacts unearthed by the HRBT project and now housed at the visitor’s center include two Civil War-era cannonballs, a World War II-era helmet liner and pieces of an old shipwreck, Banas said. Project leaders hope to open the visitor’s center, located at 9401 4th St. in Norfolk, in September.
“These are all things that are super, super interesting, that help you appreciate what came before us,” Banas said.
Trevor Metcalfe, 757-222-5345, trevor.metcalfe@pilotonline.com
