Archaeologists in East St. Louis, Illinois, dig to find an ancient civilization that vanished.

The largest excavation of a prehistoric site in the country is poised to solve a riddle about Illinois prehistory that has lingered for a century — where did the Mississippians (the Indigenous People) go? And why?

The Mississippian culture was a mound-building civilization of indigenous people that flourished in what is now the Midwestern, Eastern, and Southeastern United States from approximately 1600 AD to 800 AD, varying regionally.

An enormous dig of a village site in 2011 first inhabited about 1000 A.D. on 78 acres of what used to be the St. Louis National Stock Yards Company [1]. The stockyards company built 'National City, a small town for its employees, just 2 miles north of East St. Louis, Illinois. The site is providing so much data and so many artifacts that archaeologists are daring to speculate that basic questions about the indigenous people may finally be answered.

The St. Louis National Stockyards Company.

The indigenous people, whose pottery and building styles identify them as a single cultural group, lived in or near the Mississippi Valley more than 1100 years ago. They erected complex cities, built enormous mounds for ritualistic purposes, and disappeared in the space of about 200-300 years.

But the stockyards dig, known as the "East St. Louis site," was abandoned by the indigenous people after only 150 years.

This site is 8 miles west of the region's main group of mounds, now the grounds of the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site near Collinsville, which was occupied for about another 150 years after they left the East St. Louis site. However, less than 1% of the Cahokia Mounds site has been excavated because of a policy that the area should be reserved for future study.

But the East St. Louis village site will be fully excavated.

"By 1200 AD, the indigenous people are gone from this site with no evidence of any other occupation," said archaeologist Patrick Durst about the dig at the old stockyards. Durst, of the Prairie Research Institute of the University of Illinois at Champaign, supervises 90 hired diggers.

"What happened to them is one of the research questions we're hoping to answer. Having an opportunity to completely investigate a major portion of a site, this large is almost unheard of. When we are finished with this project, more of the East St. Louis mound group and the complex associated with it will have been excavated than all of Cahokia," says Durst.

One of the questions is whether the people who lived in the East St. Louis village site were the same people who lived at the much larger Cahokia Mounds site.

"We're trying to identify how this community, and its large mound center, relates to Cahokia, the largest mound center," Durst said, "We don't know exactly the direct relationships between these groups. It could be different groups that didn't necessarily work together. We don't necessarily think they were enemies, but they may not be the exact same cultural groups."

For residents of Southern and central Illinois, the ancient indigenous people represent a presence that turns up in daily life, from the "birdman" symbol etched into state highway overpasses to the term "Cahokia."

The Real Cahokia "Birdman Tablet."

But what is still unknown is: Where did they come from and what happened to them? Did they die off, or did they become the "Indians" of more modern times?

The small army of diggers has been working since 2008 to finish this excavation by the end of the year. This area, once home to 3,000 people who lived 500 years before Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas, lies in the path of the New Mississippi River Bridge Project (rebuilding a new Martin Luther King Jr. Bridge beginning in August of 2018) and must be excavated or lost to bulldozers. Less than a mile away near St. Clair Avenue, construction crews are already repaving roads that will lead to the bridge.

For archaeologists, this location is significant because it would have been the first habitation seen by visitors in prehistoric times to this region as they cruised down a much wider and shallower Mississippi River in dugout canoes. The village would have been in the path of native people headed for the Cahokia Mounds ritual center 8 miles further inland.

Durst speculated that from the river, the village would have been an awesome sight easily visible because the years of habitation would have deforested the slope leading from the rivers-edge. Hundreds of smoke plumes from campfires would have filled the horizon. And marker poles, which were tree trunks set upright in the ground and possibly containing forbidding carvings of gods or animals, warned visitors that they were entering a place where highly civilized people ruled.

Artifacts usually found in other states, including pieces of finely decorated pottery from Arkansas, Missouri and Iowa and beads carved from shells from the Gulf of Mexico, are being found almost daily. These discoveries support a long-held theory that the entire Cahokia area was the center of a culture that built mounds throughout the Midwest and southeastern United States.

A 6-inch high stone statue of a kneeling woman holding a conch shell was found in 2010. It is believed to be one of only a few that are known to exist.

Durst said that the sheer amount of data being collected all from one place is likely to lead to answers to basic questions about the indigenous people.

A smaller but very artifact-rich, nearby site just east of Brooklyn, Illinois, called "Janey B. Goode," was excavated in the early 2000s. Durst said that it contained about 800 features. A feature can be the remains of a dwelling or communal structure, a waste pit, fireplace or hearth or the dark stains in the earth where large, log-like poles were placed upright in the ground.

But the larger East St. Louis site has more than 2,500 features, including the remains of 500 dwellings, although many more ancient homesites might remain buried, Durst said.

"How and when this urban commercial and ritual center all came together and what caused it to fall apart is what we want to answer," said Brad Koldehoff, an archaeologist and cultural resources director for the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT). The dig is a joint effort by the Illinois State Archaeological Survey and IDOT.

Koldehoff said that the village's abandonment might have been a result of the overexploitation of animals and plants. While the indigenous people depended on fishing and growing a primitive type of corn and other vegetables, like squash and beans, they needed firewood and meat from game animals to augment their diet.

"Staying in one place too long almost sets you up to fail," Koldehoff said.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D. 

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[1] National City was a suburb of East St. Louis, Illinois. Incorporated in 1907, it was a company town for the St. Louis National Stock Yards Company. In 1996, the company, which owned all residential property in the town, evicted all of its residents. The following year, because it had no residents, National City was dissolved by a court order. Its site was subsequently annexed by nearby Fairmont City, Illinois.

[2] The Birdman Tablet was discovered in 1971 during excavations at the base of the eastern side of Monks Mound, conducted by the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Archaeologists theorize that the bird of prey on the front of the tablet symbolically represents the Upper World. The Middle World (of man) is represented by the human figure wearing the costume, and the Lower World is represented by the snakeskin pattern found on the back of the tablet.

Prehistoric Saltwater Shark Nursery Fossils Found in Illinois.

Not far from Chicago, in a region now dominated by cornfields and whitetail deer, scientists say they've found fossil evidence of a “shark nursery” where prehistoric predators hatched.

The finding, which challenges long-held notions about ancient marine life, highlights a collection of prized local fossils preserved for more than 310 million years by a rare geologic process and then brought to the surface in recent decades by coal mining.

Like salmon in reverse, long-snouted "Bandringa Rayi" sharks (henceforth; Bandringa) migrated downstream from freshwater swamps to a tropical coastline to spawn 310 million years ago, leaving behind fossil evidence of one of the earliest known shark nurseries.

Photo of a fossil impression left by a juvenile Bandringa Rayi shark. These long-extinct sharks are known for their extremely long spoonbill snouts, which resemble those of modern-day paddlefish. This individual measures about 4 inches from snout to tail and was found in marine sediments at the Mazon Creek deposit in Illinois.

Fossils of Bandringa was discovered in 1969 in Will County as strip mining altered the landscape south of Chicago. Coal companies would discard piles of dirt rich with fossils, said Paul Mayer of the Field Museum, and allow people to pick through the churned earth.

Michael Coates, a University of Chicago evolutionary biologist, said the Bandringa sharks likely spent most of their adult lives in the rivers that run through present-day Ohio and Pennsylvania, citing fossils found in those states in recent decades. But Coates and a colleague suggest that the long-snouted critters laid their eggs and spent the early part of their lives in shallow coastal waters, such as the sea that once covered Illinois' Mazon Creek area and much of the Midwest.

Fossils of Bandringa Rayi were discovered in Will County, Illinois in 1969.

Amateur archaeologists and experts alike combed through the piles, and many of the fossils they brought home ended up at the Field Museum, which has the two Illinois samples studied by Coates, a public display about Mazon Creek, and thousands of the region's specimens in storage.

Mazon Creek's fossils began forming hundreds of millions of years ago when flowering plants and grass were nonexistent and when dinosaurs — not to mention humans — had yet to roam the Earth, Mayer said.

“When these sharks died, they fell into the mud of an estuary or even freshwater ponds in a little delta-like area,” said Mayer, who oversees about 40,000 Mazon Creek specimens as the Field's fossil invertebrate collections manager. “They were buried in the mud, and, for whatever reason, iron came in and cemented the rock around them.”

The process preserved many organisms that would have simply decomposed elsewhere, allowing today's scientists to study ancient jellyfish, worms, and the soft-bodied Tully Monster. It also led to a fuller picture of sharks.

The Tully Monster is found only in Illinois and is the state's official fossil.

“The preservation of Mazon Creek allowed us to reconstruct this animal in detail using the fossil record,” said Lauren Sallan, a University of Michigan evolutionary biologist, who started the research as a graduate student rotating through Coates' Chicago lab.

Coates and Sallan's analyzed two Bandringa samples from Mazon Creek originally identified by scientists as separate species. The juvenile sharks, just 4 to 6 inches long, had pronounced spoon-billed snouts that stretched half as long as their bodies and, Coates said, “looks a little bit like the things you see today in sturgeon, paddlefish.” Their findings suggest that the two sets of fossils are in fact members of the same bottom-feeding species, and a juvenile version of the adult sharks found fossilized in Ohio and Pennsylvania. 

After reevaluating 24 fossils, including latex “peels” of Bandringa’s scale-covered skin, it was concluded that Bandringa was a single species that lived, at various times during its life, in fresh, brackish water, and salt water.

Young Bandringas — but not adults — have turned up in Illinois and adult ones — but not their offspring — were found farther east suggests that the sharks thrived in freshwater but used saltwater havens (like the one south of present-day Chicago) as a “shark nursery” to lay eggs and allow young animals to live safely.

Although no sharks living today are known to travel from freshwater to saltwater to lay eggs, most sharks do use shark nurseries.

An artist’s rendering of a 310 million-year-old Bandringa Rayi shark, originally found in fossil deposits from Mazon Creek in Illinois.

The physical differences between the two purported species were due to different preservation processes at marine and freshwater locations, Coates and Sallan concluded. The freshwater sites tended to preserve bones and cartilage, while the marine sites preserved soft tissue.

By combining the complementary data sets from both types of fossil sites and reclassifying Bandringa as a single species, Coates and Sallan gained a far more complete picture of the extinct shark’s anatomy and discovered several previously unreported features. They include downward-directed jaws ideal for suction-feeding off the bottom (getting their nutrients from algae and other plant material), needle-like spines on the head and cheeks, and a complex array of sensory organs (electroreceptors and mechanoreceptors) on both the extended snout and body, suited for detecting prey in murky water.

It’s also the earliest evidence for segregation, meaning that juveniles and adults were living in different locations, which implies migration into and out of these nursery waters. Adult Bandringa sharks lived exclusively in freshwater swamps and rivers, according to Coates and Sallan. Females apparently traveled downstream to a tropical coastline to lay their eggs in shallow marine waters, a reverse version of the modern-day salmon’s sea-to-stream migration. At the time, the coastline of the super-continent Pangaea ran diagonally between the Mazon Creek freshwater and marine sites.

All the Bandringa fossils from the Mazon Creek marine sites are juveniles, and they were found alongside egg cases -- protective capsules that enclose eggs of the next generation -- belonging to an early species of shark. Adult Bandringa fossils have been found only at freshwater locations, including several in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

An artist’s rendering of a 310 million-year-old, bottom-feeder, Bandringa Rayi shark.

Coates and Sallan said that the juvenile Bandringa sharks hatched from the Mazon Creek egg cases and that the deposit’s marine sites represent a shark nursery where females spawned and then departed, returning upstream to freshwater rivers and swamps.

“This is the first fossil evidence for a shark nursery that’s based on both egg cases and the babies themselves,” Sallan said. “It’s also the earliest evidence for segregation, meaning that juveniles and adults were living in different locations, which implies migration into and out of these nursery waters.”

The findings, both scientists say, were possible only because of the fossils found south of Chicago, which are renowned in scientific circles even if they're unknown to many locals. Coates said he learned about the fossils as a graduate student in the United Kingdom and was eager to study them when he arrived here. “The Mazon Creek fossils are world-famous,” he said, “and it's on Chicago's doorstep.”

Compiled by Neil Gale, Ph.D. 

The Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals of Illinois.

Tyrannosaurus Rex

No dinosaur bones or fossils have ever been discovered in Illinois -- for the simple reason that this state's geologic sediments were being eroded away, rather than actively deposited, during most of the Mesozoic Era [1] (250,000,000 BC to 65,000 BC). No dinosaur bones or fossils have been found in Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana or Ohio.

Still, Illinois can boast a significant number of amphibians and invertebrates dating to the Paleozoic Era [2] (541,000,000 BC to 251,900,000), as well as a handful of Pleistocene period (2,600,00 BC to 12,000 BC) pachyderms (Woolly Mammoths, Mastodons and other elephant type mammals). Illinois was geologically unproductive for much of the Mesozoic and Cenozoic Eras (250,000,000 BC to 2,000,000 BC), hence the lack of fossils dating from this vast expanse of time.

Woolly Mammoths

American Mastodon

However, conditions improved tremendously during the Pleistocene period when herds of Woolly Mammoths and American Mastodons tramped across this state's endless plains (and left scattered fossil remains to be discovered, piecemeal, by 19th and 20th-century paleontologists).

Joe Devera has been an Illinois State Geological Survey geologist for over 30 years. "Other dinosaurs, such as T-Rex, could be found in Illinois, but they're covered up by vegetation and soil," he said. "People think of dinosaur bones out West because the ground is dry and eroded, and bones are much easier to find," Devera said he believes dinosaurs roamed the state during the Cretaceous period (145,000,000 BC to 66,000,000 BC).

Devera is particularly interested in finding the bones of duckbilled dinosaurs -- plant-eaters known as hadrosaurs -- because their remains have already been detected in northeastern Missouri. Devera said a researcher got "darn lucky" in Missouri and found dinosaur fossils when a well was being dug. Three kinds of dinosaur fossils have been found in Missouri: Hadrosaurs, Parrosaurus, and a small Tyrannosaurid (perhaps Albertosaurus).

After hours of research, I finally found Tyrannosaurus Rex bones in Illinois. It's SUE, the famous T. Rex we all know and love. 

SUE in the Main Hall of the Field Museum in Chicago.

She is no longer featured in the main entrance hall of the Field Museum in Chicago.

SUE is in Chicago's Griffin Halls of Evolving Planet of the Field Museum.

SUE is in her new home in the Griffin Halls of Evolving Planet display on the upper level of the Field Museum.

Is it possible to find dinosaur fossils in Illinois?

To find dinosaurs, you need Jurassic or Cretaceous-age rocks. Unfortunately, there are no Jurassic rock outcroppings in Illinois and very little Cretaceous. As you can see, there is just a tiny bit of dark green at the southern point of Illinois and an even smaller patch in western Illinois. These dark green colored locations are mapped as "Undifferentiated" Cretaceous -- which means their age has not been accurately determined yet. It's not hopeful. If the rocks contained common, well-preserved fossils, we would already know their age.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D. 

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[1] The Mesozoic Era includes the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods.

[2] The Paleozoic Era is the earliest of three geologic eras of the Phanerozoic Eon. It is the longest of the Phanerozoic eras, lasting from 541,000,000 BC to 251,900,000, and is subdivided into six geologic periods: the Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, and Permian.