A prehistoric species stars in a modern-day hunter’s tale.
This story was originally published in the October 2022 issue of Wonderful West Virginia. To subscribe, visit wonderfulwv.com
Written by Stan Bumgardner
Photography by Kevin Adkins
When you were a child—or an adult, for that matter—did you ever wander through the woods and fantasize about finding a hidden treasure? A rusty Civil War bullet? Maybe a nugget of gold?
On Mother’s Day 2022, 36-year-old Kevin Adkins of Red House in Putnam County had one of these “dreams come true” moments when he was out spring gobbler hunting with his father-in-law, Tony Hager. They didn’t track down many turkeys that day but managed to have a hunting experience they’ll never forget.
“What Is This?”
That morning, everything looked a little different in the Putnam County hollow where Adkins had hunted countless times. He was familiar with every inch of the terrain, but, at the same time, nothing looked quite right. For days, heavy rains and flash flooding had swept through the hollow. Adkins immediately noticed a lot of debris—downed tree limbs, logs, and such.
“After every big rain,” he says, “it changes through there. About 40 yards ahead, where I usually cross the dry spot in the creek, I saw something laying there. I thought it was just part of a root ball that’d gotten washed out during the flooding. As I approached it and stepped into the creek, I looked down and noticed it had teeth, and there were still two molars left in the roof of the mouth and several empty sockets.”
The floods had washed some type of skull out from where it had been lodged in the creek bed for who knows how long. But what kind of skull was it? In all the times Adkins had crossed that creek, even after other deluges, he’d never seen anything like this.
“It was covered in mud with a lot of gravel lodged in its teeth,” Adkins says, “so I really couldn’t make out what it was. But it was large, and it definitely had my interest. I picked it up, and, at the time, it weighed about 30 pounds.”
Given the skull’s heft, especially loaded down with mud, they decided to set it to the side, go looking for turkeys, and pick it up as they backtracked home. But Adkins couldn’t concentrate on gobblers. He wanted to know more about his muddy mystery. Cell service can be spotty at best in rural West Virginia—a benefit of getting out in the woods—but, on this day, Adkins wanted to do some online research on his cell phone. So he and Tony called it an early day, went back to retrieve their treasure, and started rinsing it in the creek.
“Once I got the mud off it,” he recalls, “the dark-brown bronze color of it started to show, and I was thinking, ‘This is odd.’ I spend a lot of time out in the woods, and I typically find deer skulls and the occasional cow or pig skull, but this was something different from anything I was familiar with. I put it in my turkey vest, which made it a lot easier to haul out of the woods. As soon as I felt my phone vibrate, I knew I had enough signal where I could start looking.”
But even with internet access, he kept striking out. When he got the skull home, he started googling and quickly verified it wasn’t from an animal that still roams these parts. Even reaching further back into history, he couldn’t find anything similar. He uploaded photos to social media. Comments poured in, but he’d already eliminated everything people were guessing. His dad, George Adkins, saw the posts on Facebook, sparking a research frenzy of his own. George soon stumbled across photos of giant ground sloth fossils and noticed some obvious similarities.
Adkins notes, “After some more digging, we were pretty sure that was what I was holding. But being Mother’s Day, we didn’t know who to call. It’s not like I know any paleontologists right off.”
First thing Monday morning, he called the West Virginia Geological & Economic Survey in Morgantown. “I know they weren’t expecting this phone call first thing on a Monday morning,” Adkins says. “I tried to put myself on the other end of that call and thought, ‘I know crazy things happen on Monday mornings at work, but this is definitely not what I was expecting to happen.'”
He told Director Elizabeth Rhenberg his story and emailed her his photos. “She came back with a probable confirmation, but there were some minor differences to it that did catch her attention, so she couldn’t positively ID it,” he says. “She reached out to a couple of other experts, Ray Garton and Greg McDonald, who’s known as ‘Dr. Sloth.’ Within a couple days, we had 100% confirmation that we had a Megalonyx, a giant ground sloth.”
Sloths? In West Virginia?
We normally associate sloths with more tropical climates or in zoos. So how did this one get to Putnam County? After all, the notoriously sluggish sloth isn’t known for long journeys.
From about 10 million to 11,000 years ago, our region—and much of today’s United States—was home to many forms of wildlife we wouldn’t recognize, such as giant ground sloths and mastodons. Both went extinct, likely due to hunting by a fast-growing population of early prehistoric people who arrived in North America as the climate began to warm.
By today’s sloth standards, ours was truly a giant, measuring on average about 10 feet in height and more than 1,000 pounds—about four times the height and 70 times as heavy as modern sloths. Some were as big as modern elephants. This colossal vegetarian could roam farther north than its sloth relatives due to its thick coat of fur, which could withstand colder weather.
Two Degrees of Separation
Adding another twist to this already bizarre story, Adkins’ discovery also connects him to Thomas Jefferson. In the 1790s, early settlers were mining saltpeter in a cave in what would soon become Monroe County. They stumbled upon some unusual-looking bones, including part of a femur, an ulna, a radius, foot bones, and three large claws. In 1796, Colonel John Stuart, often known as the father of Greenbrier County, sent the curious-looking specimens to Jefferson, who enjoyed dabbling in science much more than in politics. He calculated the bones to be from an animal “three times the size of a lion.”
The next year, while serving as our nation’s second vice president, Jefferson took the bones to a meeting of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. He theorized they belonged to a prehistoric lion that once roamed the Appalachians. He gave it the Latin name Megalonyx, or “great claw.” Two years later, Caspar Wistor, an early American pioneer in anatomy, published his own findings, determining the bones to be from a giant ground sloth. In 1822, Wistor would coin the animal’s official Latin name: Megalonyx jeffersonii.
Other Megalonyx fossils eventually turned up in West Virginia, including in caves in Greenbrier and Pendleton counties, and, in 2022, in a Putnam County creek bed. Given the giant ground sloth’s prominence in West Virginia paleontology, not to mention its link to the author of the Declaration of Independence, Megalonyx jeffersonii was named West Virginia’s official state fossil by the state Legislature in 2008—an effort guided by Ray Garton, who helped confirm Adkins’ find.
The Megalonyx bones once in Jefferson’s possession are now housed at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. However, replicas can be found at the West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey Museum in Morgantown and at the Interstate 64 welcome center in Greenbrier County.
Adkins hopes his find will add to our scientific knowledge about these giant mammals who once roamed the West Virginia hills. He’s excited to see whether paleontologists find more remnants from the same sloth. “From talking to the experts,” he says, “we don’t think the skull traveled far, because the cheekbone structure is really fragile. If it had tumbled down that creek bed very far, it would have probably shattered those cheek bones.”
Hopefully, the bluish clay that kept this skull intact for millennia may have preserved other sloth bones nearby, although finding prehistoric bones in a creek bed, even knowing the approximate location, is like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
For now, Adkins is hanging on to his big find while the search for the rest of the sloth continues. He was contacted by Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Natural History, which has a full-size reconstructed Megalonyx skeleton on display. A curator from the museum told Adkins his sloth skull is more intact than any Megalonyx specimen at Carnegie.
Whether or not more is found, history books will remember Adkins for making one of the most significant paleontology discoveries in West Virginia history. And he will forever be associated indirectly with our third president. When asked about this, he says, “You know, I hadn’t thought about it that way, but yeah, it’s pretty cool.”
“This skull is something you look at in museums,” he reflects proudly, “and I’m holding it here in my hands. It seems unreal.”