KENNEWICK — Sticking out of the dirt just south of Kennewick is what appears to be a large vertebrae, possibly two feet long, of a mammoth.

It’s one of about a dozen partially exposed bones at the Coyote Canyon Mammoth Site, with most showing too little surface area for diggers to identify yet.

The vertebrae will likely be unearthed in the current dig season and possibly some of the other “mystery” bones will be revealed, said Gary Kleinknecht, a retired Kamiakin High teacher and the volunteer who serves as the education director for the project.

This will be the ninth season of digging at the site, with the public following the progress and learning about mammoths and the Ice Age floods that may have deposited the mammoth’s carcass near the Tri-Cities.

Last spring 2,000 students visited the dig site and Kleinknecht suspects that this year’s field trips and youth group tours may top that.

The student trips are so popular that some show up with more adult volunteers than kids, he said.

Register for tours

But you don’t have to volunteer for a field trip to see the site.

You can register for public tours planned July 20, Aug. 17, Sept. 21 and Oct. 12.

However, the tours are expected to fill quickly when online registration for the summer and fall tours opens May 20 at www.coyotecanyonmammothsite.org.

Spring tours are already filled, despite no publicity.

Participants will be given more information when they register, including the directions to the dig site, which is at an undisclosed location to prevent vandalism.

Finding mammoth bones in Washington left from the Ice Age floods is not unusual. But they are usually found when construction excavation is being done and there’s not time to study them thoroughly.

This dig site is different.

The land was donated for research and education. The site is being excavated to exacting standards that modern paleontology and archaeology require to find out as much as possible — not only about the mammoth but the times it lived in and the Ice Age floods that may have swept up the animal.

Buckets of dirt are carefully sifted to collect other animal bones, what’s left of insects and plant seeds to capture data to show how plants and animals changed over time, reflecting different environmental and climate conditions.

Mystery of mammoth’s death

“The general goal is a biological study,” Kleinknecht said. “As long as we continue to find new species we will keep digging.”

There’s also a crime to solve — the mystery of the mammoth’s death, Kleinknecht said.

His bones were found in ice age flood sediment and among granite rocks, called erratics, that likely floated in on icebergs.