Ice Age mammoth tusk discovered in Mississippi

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Amateur fossil hunter Eddie Templeton usually knows when he’s found something. Having scoured the banks of Mississippi creeks since he was a child, Templeton has unearthed a number of fascinating extinct mammals, including a mastodon jaw, several bones from a giant armadillo relative, and even a cat foot bone with sharp fangs. But his latest find may be the most bizarre.

Templeton was wading in about 3 feet (about 1 meter) of water in a Madison County creek on Aug. 3 when he came across a giant tusk partially exposed from a mud bank. He said conditions weren’t conducive to fossil hunting—the water was blocked from draining downstream and there were no exposed gravel bars—so he didn’t expect to find anything particularly significant that day. The 7-foot-long (2.1-meter-long) tusk, which turned out to be completely intact, and which he shared with George Phillips, curator of paleontology at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, proved him wrong.

Phillips confirmed that the tusk belonged to a Columbian mammoth, a type of marine mammal. near far From the woolly mammoth. The Columbian mammoth lived during the late Cretaceous period. Pleistocene EpochThe fossil is estimated to be between 11,700 and 75,000 years old, Phillips said.

“It was definitely exciting to find a big piece of tusk. But it was especially exciting because it was a mammoth,” Templeton told CNN. “Once the geologists got there and we started to unearth it and realized it was the entire tusk, from tip to base, it was even more exciting. So things got better as the day went on.”

Prior to Templeton’s discovery, only isolated teeth of a Columbian mammoth had been found in Mississippi, making it the first such find in the region and offering a “rare window” into the giant Ice Age mammals that once roamed the area, according to a statement from the University of Mississippi. Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality.

While the massive Columbian mammoth – which Overloaded 22,000 pounds (10 tons) and could grow to be over 13 feet (4 meters) long – lived across north america Along with the mastodon, its diet consisted largely of grasses found in grassland areas, which were rare on what is now the East Coast of the United States during that period, Phillips said. As a result, its fossils have become difficult to find in the area.

“For every 25 American mastodon teeth, we find at most one mammoth tooth. So mammoths are relatively rare, not just in terms of mastodons, but everything else,” Phillips said.

When Templeton first found the giant tusk, he assumed it came from a mastodon, having found several remains of the creature on previous hunting trips. After a local museum and the state geology office helped him uncover the massive remains, Templeton began to reconsider—mostly because of the fossil’s curve.

The Columbian mammoth’s tusks are so curved that two of them can form almost a full circle, whereas the tusks of the common mastodon don’t curve as much, Phillips said. The museum has many tooth fragments and even several complete mammoth teeth — there may even be some fragments of the giant mammal’s tusks that would be indistinguishable from a mastodon without the rest of the tusk — but a complete, intact tusk like the one discovered is particularly rare, he added.

“I was blown away when I saw the picture,” Phillips said. “I thought, ‘Well, that’s a great tusk. Wait a minute… it’s so curved. Oh my God, that’s a mammoth tusk.’”

While the fossil was being extracted, field scientists simultaneously covered exposed parts with plaster to keep the fossil protected while it was being extracted. Templeton said the tusks grew in rings, similar to tree growth, making the fossils more susceptible to fragmentation once they dried out of the wet sediments where they were found.

The tusk — which weighs 600 pounds (272 kilograms) with its plaster case — is currently at the museum, where experts will closely monitor it as it dries and then treats it with a bonding agent to preserve it. Scientists will also need to reassemble the fragile fossil, which broke into two pieces during transport. Phillips said he hopes to have the tusk on display in time for the museum’s annual fossil show during the first week of March next year.

“I think most people are curious about the past, and these large animals that were around during the Ice Age are very interesting to people,” Templeton said. “I’m sure there have been mammoth tusk fragments found in Mississippi, but they probably haven’t been positively identified as mammoths just because they’re fragments. But this is the first complete mammoth tusk ever found in Mississippi. That’s pretty cool.”