by Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on exciting discoveries, scientific advances and more.
Amateur fossil hunter Eddie Templeton usually knows when he’s onto something. Having scoured holly banks in Mississippi since he was a child, Templeton’s made some stunning discoveries of extinct mammals, including a mastodon mandible, numerous bones from a giant armadillo relative, and even the leg bone of a saber-toothed cat. . But his latest discovery may be the most unexpected.
Templeton was wading through about 3 feet (almost 1 meter) of water in a pond in Madison County on August 3 when he came across a huge tussock that was partially exposed from the mud bank. The conditions weren’t ideal for fossil hunting, he said — the water was blocked from flowing downstream and there were no exposed gravel bars — so he didn’t expect to make a particularly significant discovery. that day. When he came across the 7-foot-long (2.1 meters long) tusk, completely intact, and shared it with George Phillips, curator of paleontology at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, he was wrong.
Phillips confirmed that the tusk belonged to a Colombian mammoth, a distant relative of the woolly mammal. The Columbia mammoth lived during the end of the Pleistocene Age, making the fossil anywhere from about 11,700 to 75,000 years old, Phillips said.
“It was exciting to get a big piece of tusk, for sure. But it was really exciting that it was huge,” Templeton told CNN. “After the geologists got there, and we started to uncover it and realized that it was the whole thing, from top to bottom, it was even more exciting. So things got better as the day went on.”
Prior to the discovery of Templetown, only isolated teeth of the Columbian mammal had been found in Mississippi, making it a first-of-its-kind find for the region and offering a “rare window” into the giant ice mammals that once roamed the area. a time. , according to a statement from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality.
Mammoth Mississippi to discover
Although the Columbian giant – which weighed over 22,000 pounds (10 tons) and could grow to be over 13 feet (4 meters) tall – lived throughout North America alongside the mastodon, whose diet consists mostly of grasses found in the grassland biome, a. now rare on the east coast of the United States during that period, Phillips said. As a result, it is much more difficult to find fossils in the area.
“For every, say, 25 fragments or complete teeth of an American mastodon, we find maybe one large tooth at best. So, mammoths are proportionally rare, not just in relation to trees, but in relation to everything else,” Phillips said.
When Templeton first came across the giant tusk, he assumed it was from a tree stand, having found some remains of the creature on his previous hunt. It was only after the local museum and the state geology office helped find the massive remains that Templetown began to have second thoughts – mainly because of the fossil’s story arc.
The columbia mummy’s tusks are so curved that two people could almost make a full circle, but common tusks don’t curve nearly as much, Phillips said. There are many tooth fragments in the museum and even some complete teeth from the mammal – even some fragments of tusk from the giant mammal indistinguishable from the mastodon without the rest of the tusk – but a complete tusk, intact as there is one only rarely discovered, he said.
“I was kind of speechless when I saw the picture,” Phillips said. “I thought, ‘Okay, well, cool, cool. Wait a second… it’s so curved. Holy cow, this is a huge tussock.’”
While uncovering the fossil, the field scientists covered the exposed pieces with plaster at the same time to protect the fossil during extraction. The tusks grew in a ring, similar to how trees grow, Templetown said, making the fossils more likely to split when they dry out after being taken from the moist deposits where they are found. them.
The tusk – which weighs 600 pounds (272 kilograms) with the plaster jacket – is currently at the museum, where experts will closely monitor it as it dries and then treat it with a sealant for preservation. Scientists will also need to reassemble the fragile fossil, which broke into two pieces during transport. Phillips said he hopes to have the tosk on display in time for the Museum’s Amazing Road Show during the first week of March next year.
“I think most people are curious about the past, and people are fascinated by these megafauna that existed during the ice age,” Templetown said. “I’m sure pieces of mammary tusk have been found in Mississippi, but they probably weren’t positively identified as mammary because they were fragments. But this is the first complete giant tusk found in Mississippi. And so that’s great.”
For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
