Whenever researchers talk about historic St. Paul, chances are they’re referencing stately old homes or long-ago lost architecture. Greg Brick spends a lot of his time looking for prehistoric St. Paul in rocks, sand and sediment.

The Highland Park native and former Department of Natural Resources geologist is pretty excited about what he’s found near his old stomping grounds: evidence of a glacial lake bursting 10,000 years ago. He used a map of ice age-era St. Paul prepared by geologist Carrie Jennings in 1992 and compared it to a ravine that seemed too large to have been carved by the small stream moving through it. For Brick, the finding ranks right up there with the discovery of the skeleton of a giant beaver in Hidden Falls Park in 1938.