Some things are not always what they appear to be, and sometimes the answer to a mystery can be a real surprise.
The Devil’s Corkscrews in the Sioux Country of Nebraska have long been regarded as a scientific puzzle that was impossible to solve.
Who carved these remarkable spirals with a precision that a mathematical formula might express?
Some are fifteen feet long and about 15 to 30 million years old!
An example of Devil’s Corkscrews discovered in Nebraska. Now in the National Museum of Natural History. Credit: inazakira – CC BY 2.0
The typical Devil’s Corkscrew consists of two parts – the screw and a mᴀssive “root,” sometimes as big round as a hogshead, which branches off from the lower end of the spiral.
Within about 500 square miles in Nebraska, there are millions of these curious objects, composed of quartz, revealed to view by being “weathered out” of the sandstone formation.
The spirals were discovered in 1894 when an expedition sought fossils in the Badlands of Wyoming, Nebraska, Rocky Mountains. On their first day out, they found some large corkscrew fossils known locally as Devil’s Corkscrews. Professor Barbour, an academic paleontologist, gave them the Latin name “Daemonelix.”
Scientists could not explain the origin of the spirals. Credit: University of Nebraska
Unfortunately, as it so often is, due to the lack of explanation for the curious spirals, they were soon labeled as the work of the Devil. Scientists had encountered a true mystery and were forced to admit they did not know the origin or creators of these mysterious spirals.
People wondered how a twisted pillar 15ft. (or more) in height, as mathematically formed as any ordinary corkscrew out of quartz rock, could have been craved without intervention by some artifice. Surely, these odd spirals must be the work of some evil tricksters, or even the Devil himself, supersтιтious people said
Plainly, from the popular viewpoint, some supernatural agency must be responsible for the phenomenon in question, which is known to the better informed as a “fossil twister.” The spirals are fossils – of that there can be no doubt – but if we reject the theory of diabolical intervention, what or whom could possibly lie behind the creation of the Devil’s Corkscrews?
Some of the discovered Devil’s Corkscrews are fifteen feet long and about 15 to 30 million years old! Credit: University of Nebraska
Some scientists speculated these were petrified vines, but who had heard of a vine climbing in a mathematical spiral? Others suggested that they were fossil worms of huge size—a most ingenious and even plausible idea.
In a region known to have been inhabited formerly by many gigantic species of reptiles some of them 90ft. in length – whose remains are dug out of the rocks in the Bad Lands today, why should there not have been exceptionally large worms?
When the mystery was solved, scientists understood this little creature was responsible for creating the giant corkscrews. Quite a surprise for some. Credit: © N. Tamura – CC BY 3.0
Later investigation revealed something quite startling and yet very logical. The Devil’s Corkscrews’ unknown creator was a prehistoric beaver called Palaeocastor!
The Palaeocastor lived in the North American Badlands during the late Oligocene period. It made corkscrew-shaped burrows and tunnels and gnawed through the earth instead of wood.
The animals made verticle corkscrew-shaped burrows with side nesting chambers and other compartments used as latrines or for water drainage. Upon abandonment, tree roots grew into spiral-shaped burrows and later fossilized.
These corkscrew fossils can still be seen at the Agate Fossil Beds National Monument on the Niobrara River in northwestern Nebraska.
