The Vero Beach Mammoth Engraving

The Vero Beach mammoth engraving is a small piece of fossil bone from Vero Beach with the outline of a mammoth or mastodon scratched into its surface.

In June 2011 researchers from the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Florida announced, as reported by Smithsonian Insider, that the Vero fragment is approximately 13,000 years old and that its engraving is the oldest and only known example of Ice Age art in the Americas to depict a proboscidean, the order of animals with trunks.

The team's research was published online in the Journal of Archaeological Science, according to the Smithsonian. Barbara Purdy, professor emerita of anthropology at the University of Florida, was the lead author, and Dennis Stanford, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, was a co-author, so the Vero bone was examined by specialists from both institutions.

An avocational fossil hunter collected the bone in Vero Beach and discovered the engraving later, while cleaning it.

Recognizing its potential importance, the Vero Beach collector contacted scientists at the University of Florida and at the Smithsonian's Museum Conservation Institute and National Museum of Natural History, according to the Smithsonian. The collector is a private individual and is not named here.

The Smithsonian says the bone was originally found near the Old Vero Site, where human bones were found side by side with the bones of extinct Ice Age animals in an excavation from 1913 to 1916. The Florida Museum of Natural History calls that fossil locality the Vero Canal Site and puts it inside Vero Beach city limits in Indian River County, southeast of the Vero Beach municipal airport. Its first fossils came to light more than a century ago, when a drainage canal built by the Indian River Farms Company cut through a bone-bearing deposit extending for over 300 m. Digging there requires City of Vero Beach permission, the museum notes.

The Vero engraving shows an animal with a trunk, small enough to fit on a broken fragment of fossil bone.

The Smithsonian measures the figure at 3 inches long from the top of the head to the tip of the tail and 1.75 inches tall from the top of the head to the bottom of the right foreleg. Because of the trunk, the researchers describe the figure only as a proboscidean: the drawing could represent a mammoth or a mastodon. Both animals appear in the Florida Museum's Indian River County faunal list for Stratum 2 at the Vero Canal Site, which includes the American mastodon, Mammut americanum, and the Columbian mammoth, Mammuthus columbi, among the extinct species. The museum says the Stratum 2 fauna at Vero includes almost all of the known extinct late Pleistocene megafauna that inhabited Florida, among them three ground sloths, seven ungulates and four carnivores.

The bone itself is a fragment from a long bone of a large mammal, most likely either a mammoth or mastodon, or less likely a giant sloth, according to the Smithsonian. A precise identification was not possible because the Vero piece is fragmented and lacks diagnostic features. Stanford, of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, called it an incredibly exciting discovery and said there are hundreds of depictions of proboscideans on cave walls and carved into bones in Europe, but none had been known from America until the Vero Beach bone.

The team compared the engraved bone's chemistry with other Old Vero fossils and examined the grooves under optical and electron microscopes to learn whether the carving was ancient.

Purdy, the lead author, said there was considerable skepticism about the authenticity of the incising until the Vero bone was examined exhaustively by archaeologists, paleontologists, forensic anthropologists, materials science engineers and artists. A main goal was to learn whether the Vero image was ancient or had been cut recently to mimic prehistoric art.

The team examined the elemental composition of the engraved bone and of others from the Old Vero Site. Optical and electron microscopy showed no discontinuity in coloration between the carved grooves and the surrounding material, which indicated to the researchers that both surfaces had aged together. The edges of the Vero carving were worn, and the grooves showed no signs of recent carving or of metal tools, according to the Smithsonian's account of the study.

The Smithsonian dates the Vero engraving to at least 13,000 years ago, the last appearance of mammoths and mastodons in eastern North America.

The reasoning is that more recent Pre-Columbian people would not have seen a mammoth or mastodon to draw. For the researchers, the Vero Beach piece is evidence that people living in the Americas during the last Ice Age created artistic images of the animals they hunted. The Smithsonian also said the study further validates the findings of geologist Elias Howard Sellards at the Old Vero Site, whose claims that people hunted animals at Vero Beach during the last Ice Age had been disputed over the past 95 years.

Sellards published his Vero report as Human remains from the Pleistocene of Florida in the journal Science in 1916, according to the U.S. Geological Survey publications record. The Florida Museum calls the Vero fossil locality the first New World discovery of human bones and artifacts in association with extinct Pleistocene vertebrates, and dates Stratum 2 to the late Pleistocene, 20,000 to 12,000 years ago.

The Smithsonian reported in 2011 that a cast of the carved Vero bone was part of an exhibit of Florida mammoths and mastodons at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, but that building is closed until November 23, 2026.

The museum's visitor page says a large expansion project began on March 24, 2025, and temporarily closed Powell Hall and its public exhibitions in Gainesville, with reopening set for Monday, November 23, 2026. The page does not say whether the cast of the Vero Beach bone will be on view after the reopening.

The engraving's age rests on its subject, while the wider Old Vero debate is still argued in official and scholarly sources. A Florida Museum release of May 3, 2012 described a rare earth element comparison that placed the Vero human and animal bones in the late Pleistocene, about 13,000 years ago, while Kenneth Tankersley of the University of Cincinnati cautioned that it gave no absolute date. The Florida Museum's 2015 Vero Canal Site entry states that Sellards' claims were correct. The University of Utah Press description of its 2024 volume on the 2014 to 2017 excavations, by James M. Adovasio, C. Andrew Hemmings and F. J. Vento, says the new data show Sellards' claims are not supported and that the human remains were intrusive from a later time horizon. These official and publisher sources disagree, and this page does not settle the question.

Last verified: October 15, 2026, by re-reading the 2011 Smithsonian Insider release, three Florida Museum pages (the Vero Canal Site entry, the 2012 study release and the visitor notice), the University of Utah Press book listing and the USGS record of the 1916 Sellards article.