When civic leaders and scholars gather to open the Waco Mammoth Site on Dec. 5, plenty of palaver will air about the paleontological wonders of the complex founded on the bones of two dozen or so Columbian mammoths, most victims of a sudden flood or mudslide 68,000 years ago.

But you don’t have to go back into prehistoric times to find wonders in all this. I’d say what longtime Wacoan Gloria Young and her fundraising gang have done in recent years is pretty wondrous.

A few years ago, it was hard to imagine what kind of success she would have in Waco, pumping friends, foundations, even family members for money to build what is today the Waco Mammoth Site. I mean, raising funds to house some mammoth remains isn’t exactly in the mainstream around here.

“We just told them there was an absolute treasure out there to be enjoyed for future generations,” she said, “and that if we didn’t protect it immediately, we were going to lose it because Mother Nature was going to take it back.”

That brutally honest pitch very often did the trick, though for some it helped that the U.S. Department of Interior also took a deep interest in the site — one the National Park Service now touts as “the nation’s first and only recorded discovery of a nursery herd of Pleistocene mammoths.”

Late Waco philanthropist Paul J. Meyer and his wife, Jane, were so struck by what they heard about the site and saw of site remains kept at the Mayborn Museum Complex that they thought better of the $290,000 that their foundation gave for the site’s welcome center.

When they arrived for a lunch to discuss the project further, they called Young to one side with a look of some urgency.

“I thought, ‘Oh, no, they didn’t like what they saw, and they’re going to ask for their money back!’ ”

Instead, they asked her about her fund-raising goal for the project, then offered to match the $1.7 million already raised. Young used the Meyers’ magnificent gift as a matching grant to raise yet more money from the community.

One thing that won over Department of Interior and National Park Service officials was the tremendous support that Wacoans have shown for this site in north Waco. That spurred U.S. Rep. Chet Edwards to pursue federal grants for the project. It also has sped along the ongoing legislative process of having it declared a national monument.

The drive to raise funds for the Waco Mammoth Site drew folks from all walks of life. For instance, Hillcrest Professional Development School sixth-grade students, inspired by lessons about the Columbian mammoths, raised $300 with a “makeup- and-manicures for mammoths” event on their campus.

Sixth-grade kids next year did the same.

And there was a man who celebrated his 100th birthday and decided that, in recognition of his own longevity on this precious earth, he ought to donate $100 to the Waco Mammoth Site.

The city of Waco and Baylor University, partners in the project, did plenty. Young credits City Manager Larry Groth with a pivotal role in the Waco Mammoth Site. Whenever a problem arose, “he’d always say, ‘We can make that work.’ He was the glue that kept all this together.”

At least two local men offered imposing skeletons of the famed woolly mammoth, a shaggier, more popular cousin of the Columbian mammoth, which favored more temperate zones such as Central Texas. The woolly favored colder climes.

A National Park Service paleontologist talked Young and others out of the idea of mixing their mammoths.

“What you have here is a great apple orchard that has the best apples anywhere,” he told them, “and if you start making a fruit salad of it, nobody will remember what great apples you had. These mammoths are yours — they grew here, roamed here and died here 68,000 years ago.”

True enough. Because of the latter-day labors of a lot of folks in Waco and beyond, those mighty Columbian mammoths that perished near the Bosque River before it was called the Bosque are at last enshrined and truly ours, no longer in danger of being lost to the elements or time.