A fossil collector just lately stumbled throughout a significant discover whereas exploring rural Mississippi—the state’s first confirmed mammoth tusk. However discovering it was solely the primary of many hurdles to recovering the uncommon specimen.
Though woolly mammoths and mastodons typically draw most cultural consideration, the 2 species had been removed from the one elephant ancestors to roam North America. What’s extra, they weren’t even the most important—that honor went to the Columbian mammoth. Reaching almost 14-feet-tall on the shoulders and weighing round 10 tons, Mammuthus columbi remained ice age giants till their eventual extinction round 12,700 BCE. Modern-day Mississippi, nevertheless, hosted fewer of them than their kinfolk as a consequence of their grassland grazing preferences. Nonetheless, mammoths did make their strategy to the Deep South, as evidenced by a lot of fossilized tooth collected there over time. And till just lately, tooth had been all researchers in Mississippi had—till a person named Eddie Templeton determined to take a stroll.
As first highlighted on August 13 in The Clarion-Ledger, the artifact and fossil collector just lately determined to scour for brand new finds in a rural area of Madison, outdoors Jackson. Whereas traversing a muddy creek, Templeton observed a large relic protruding from a clay and sand embankment.
“It was thrilling. I knew it was a tusk,” Templeton instructed the native newspaper.
However given mammoths’ Mississippi rarity, he initially believed the fossilized ivory belonged to a smaller mastodon. After enlisting the assistance of the Mississippi State Geological Survey (MSGS), nevertheless, it turned clear Templeton had come throughout one thing way more elusive.
“It was suspected based mostly on the robust curvature of the large tusk that Eddie and the staff had been coping with a Columbian mammoth and never that of the extra frequent mastodon,” Mississippi Division of Environmental High quality (MDEQ) researchers explained in an announcement.
A race in opposition to time and components
The staff wanted to maneuver shortly. In line with MDEQ, extended publicity to Mississippi’s stifling afternoon solar may simply dry out and destroy the specimen. For the remainder of the day, Templeton and researchers started fastidiously excavating the tusk by hand, in the end revealing a very intact, 7-foot-long fossil. After photographing it in its longtime resting place, staff prepped the tusk for transport by first overlaying it in aluminum foil. As soon as achieved, they then encased it in plaster-soaked burlap to basically type a protecting forged. Additional investigation of tusk’s positioning and its environment indicated to the sector scientists that it possible initially leaned in opposition to an historic stream’s sandbar with a portion submerged within the water. Sooner or later, alluvium buried the whole tusk, probably from main storm flooding. Due to this, it’s possible the mammoth died close by earlier than the waters carried its stays downstream.
[Related: Woolly mammoth ‘jerky’ preserves 52,000-year-old fossil chromosomes.]
As soon as shielded from the solar, the staff confronted yet one more problem—transporting the roughly 600-pound ivory up a virtually vertical 50-foot bluff, the place it could possibly be loaded onto a truck. In line with MDEQ, the answer could possibly be present in an ATV ramp they become a “makeshift gurney.” After rising from the creek, the tusk may lastly make its strategy to the Mississippi Museum of Pure Science, the place it now stays for extra examine and curation.
In an e-mail to In style Science, MDEQ geologist James Starnes described the occasion as an “necessary ice-age paleontological discover for Mississippi.”
The tusk’s new, protected house can also be a becoming finish for an historic big that, whereas not essentially as well-known as its kinfolk, was essential within the area’s environmental well being.
“These colossal mammals performed an necessary position in sustaining the wealthy fertile prairie ecosystem, a lot as their trendy elephant kinfolk do in different components of the world at present,” said MDEQ representatives.
