DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, you're looking out at a place called Swan Lake — peaceful enough name, calm water, maybe a bird or two drifting across the surface. Doesn't exactly scream ancient mystery.
But friend, what's buried beneath this ground would make your jaw drop clean off your face. Back in 1939, highway engineers showed up here in San Patricio County doing what highway engineers do — digging for caliche to use in road building. Practical work.
Unglamorous work. The kind of work where you don't expect the earth to talk back. But talk back it did.
What those engineers turned up was one of the largest assortments of fossils found in a single locality in the entire state of Texas. The whole state. Let that settle in a moment.
Between 1939 and 1941, excavators pulled out and sorted the fossils of forty-two prehistoric vertebrates right here from this one spot. Forty-two. And the roll call of creatures those fossils represented — well, that's where this story really gets going.
Mammoths. Saber-toothed tigers. Bison.
Ground sloths. Camels. Alligators.
Tapirs. Various species of fresh water fish. All of them once living, moving, breathing right here on this ground you're standing on.
An entire lost world sleeping under what we now call Swan Lake, waiting patiently for a road crew to come along and wake it up.
What the marker says
Known today as Swan Lake, this is the site of an archeological excavation that yielded one of the largest assortments of fossils found in a single locality in Texas. They were discovered in 1939 when highway engineers were digging for caliche to use in road building. Between 1939 and 1941 the fossils of 42 prehistoric vertebrates were excavated and sorted. Fossils found here represented such animals as the mammoth, saber-toothed tiger, bison, ground sloth, camel, alligator, tapir, and various species of fresh water fish. (1984)