(click to enlarge photos)
Published in The Seattle Times online on Feb. 6, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Feb. 9, 2025
This 12,500-year-old fossil found on Valentine’s Day 1961 got heart’s pounding
By Jean Sherrard
Without doubt, today’s “Then” photo is of the oldest — and largest — pelvis ever featured in this column.
Its original owner is a giant ground sloth that lived during the early Holocene era, soon after the retreat of the 3,000-foot-thick Cordilleran ice sheet. Its Puget Lobe, extending from Canada to just south of Olympia, left behind glacier-carved inland seas, lakes and rivers that still define this region’s topography.
As the ice melted, abundant life returned to the ’hood. Lowland bogs and swamps, including ample flora, supplied megafauna from mastodons to giant sloths with full larders.
Skip forward 12,500 years to Valentine’s Day 1961. Preparing to pour a concrete foundation for a Sea-Tac Airport expansion project, construction workers encountered an obstacle. Lean and compact, pile driver Gordon “Gordy” Simmons lowered himself into a 14-foot-deep hole to investigate.
“We were about 500 feet from the end of the runway,”
he recounted in a 2021 interview, “making these landing towers to guide planes in.”
At the bottom of the pit, Simmons saw what appeared to be a giant skunk cabbage, covered with rounded veins. But it crumbled away to the touch, exposing a huge hip bone. “I thought, ‘Gee, that must be an old cow or something.’ ” But it was buried too deep to be a cow.
He shouted up to a co-worker. “I got a dinosaur down here. Better call the university!”
And the paleontologists came running.
Construction was suspended while University of Washington scientists from the Burke Museum sifted through mounds of wet, unstable soil. What they unearthed was astounding.
“The Sea-Tac sloth provided the first evidence of these animals in the state,” notes David B. Williams, co-author of “Spirit Whales and Sloth Tales: Fossils of Washington State.” Just as thrilling, “it illustrated that interesting stories of natural history are everywhere, even in the heart of cities.”
The determined team recovered nearly 60% of the fossil’s remains, transferring them to the Burke Museum for further evaluation, inspiring years of rewarding research.
For Simmons, who continued working in construction until his retirement in the mid-1990s, the story of his find became a well-burnished family chestnut. Not until 2014, however, did he re-unite with his prehistoric pal, by then a featured exhibit.
In February 2022, daughter Dianna Johnson contacted the Burke with a request. Would it consider naming the giant sloth after her ailing father, then in his final weeks? Museum staff enthusiastically agreed.
Today, 11-foot tall “Gordy” welcomes visitors to the Burke Museum’s third-floor paleontology exhibit, its nickname invoking a serendipitous discovery and its intrepid discoverer.
WEB EXTRAS
First off, thanks are in order. Devlin Donnelly of the Port of Seattle greased the skids – as well as transporting the entire Simmons clan in a Port van making multiple trips to the photo site.
For a superb Port of Seattle video featuring Gordon and the sloth story, follow this link.
Here are a few more of Devlin’s photos:
Also deserving thanks and kudos, Patrick Webb, journalist for the Chinook Observer, who was first contacted by Dianna Johnson. Patrick wrote a moving account of Gordon’s fossil discovery, published shortly before his death in March, 2022.
And for a magisterial history of the Port of Seattle – which includes Gordy’s story – check out ‘Rising Tides and Tailwinds: The Story of the Port of Seattle‘ by Casey McNerthney, Kit Oldham and Peter Blecha.
More miscellany to share:
Finally, for our narrated 360 degree video, captured on on location, click right here.