Listen to tale of 700-year-old bones
The recently released audiobook ‘Campfire Stories: Discoveries, Revelations & Near Misses’ (inset) features the discovery of Rockie, a 700-year-old bison skeleton on exhibit at The Falls on the Colorado Museum in Marble Falls. Staff and courtesy images
The story of how a 700-year-old bison skeleton found its way from beneath the soil of northeast Burnet County to a display case at The Falls on the Colorado Museum in Marble Falls can be heard in an audiobook recently published by Penguin Random House.
“Campfire Stories: Discoveries, Revelations & Near Misses” was released on Aug. 13 and includes a narrative by amateur archeologist Ryan Murray, who discovered the bones on his land near Briggs. The tale of Rockie the bison is featured in “Texas Cache,” one of 11 stories included in a collection by Steven Rinella, a TV show host and author more commonly known as Meateater.
The audiobook is available for purchase at penguinrandomhouse.com or amazon.com. Murray was not paid for inclusion in the book.
“Campfire Stories” has been a No. 1 bestseller on Amazon since its release in the outdoors category of audiobooks, at least as of Aug. 26, when this story was written.
In the recording, Murray details how he discovered the bison bones and enlisted a group of friends to help slowly expose the rest of the skeleton. He sent bone samples to experts to identify and date. Eventually, one of those experts arrived in Briggs with a crew to finish the job.
“They saw features on the ground I never would have recognized,” Murray said. “He knew immediately the area was an Indian campground.”
An avid arrowhead hunter, Murray recognized five pieces of flint found in the bison’s chest cavity. Fitting them together led to an educated guess as to how the animal died.
The pieces formed a Perdiz-style arrowhead, which can be identified by its small triangular blade and long stem. The arrowhead is named for Perdiz Creek in Presidio County, where the first ones were found.
“That changed the course of what we were doing,” Murray said. “Now, we were going from a vertebrate paleontological dig to an archeological dig.”
Rockie’s carefully wrapped and identified bones were stored in boxes in Murray’s attic for several years. On a visit to The Falls on the Colorado Museum, he met board member Dr. Tom Hester. They struck up a conversation, which led to Rockie.
“I told him about the skeleton and said, ‘Do you want it?’” Murray recalled in the audiobook. “He said, ‘Let me talk to the board.’ He emailed me a day or two later and said, ‘Yes, we want it.’”
Rockie the bison’s display was opened to the public in 2018 and can be seen anytime from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Monday-Saturday at The Falls on the Colorado Museum, 2001 Broadway in Marble Falls.