Looking at the raw desert landscape of the San Jacinto Mountains outside Hemet, Calif., it's hard to imagine that more than 10,000 years ago this arid valley served as a natural watershed sustaining an ecosystem that included mastodons, woolly mammoths, saber tooth tigers, and giant sloths. The discovery of this once-thriving ice age world occurred in the mid-1990s during the creation of Diamond Valley Lake, a 4,500-acre recreational lake and reservoir. It was during excavation work on the massive $2 billion project—the largest earthworks project in U.S. history—that thousands of fossils were uncovered, a discovery that rivals that of Los Angeles's famed La Brea Tar Pits.
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