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An amateur fossil hunter found a mammoth tusk in a creek in Mississippi.
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According to experts, this was the first mammoth tusk found in the state.
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The tusks of mammoths can provide unique insights into their lives, for example into where they lived.
Amateur fossil hunter Eddie Templeton made the discovery of a lifetime on the banks of a creek in rural Madison County, Mississippi.
Recently, rainfall uncovered a 2-meter-long mammoth tusk dating back to the Pleistocene, more than 11,700 years ago.
Eddie Templeton was looking for fossils when he saw it earlier this month. But he had no idea he had found the only mammoth tusk ever found in the state.
Experts are currently examining the colossal find to learn more about the animal that roamed the area thousands of years ago.
Templeton has been searching for fossils since childhood.
Templeton is an amateur fossil hunter in the sense that he doesn’t do it for a living. But he’s no novice in the endeavor.
When Templeton was a child, his neighbor found a mastodon tooth, sparking his interest in these Ice Age animals.
In the decades since, he’s found artifacts from the Paleo-Indian era and teeth from extinct horses, but nothing that even comes close to a mammoth tusk.
Templeton often looks at the gravel beds and banks of creeks for fossils. Sometimes erosion can expose bones that have been buried for thousands of years, Templeton said.
While wading through several feet of water, Templeton saw the tusk lying in the bank, partially below the waterline.
“I’ve found other mastodon fossils in this creek, but I’ve never found a mammoth fossil. So I assumed it was a mastodon tusk,” he said.
It helped that he knew what to look for. Others might have mistaken it for a tree root, he said.
Templeton assumed he had found the tusk of a mastodon and was surprised to find it was a mammoth.
Mammoths, mastodons, and modern elephants are all related. This particular mammoth’s tusk belongs to a Columbian mammoth. These animals were larger than the stereotypical woolly types.
The ancestors of these giants reached a shoulder height of 13 feet and arrived in North America about 1.5 million years ago. Mastodons, on the other hand, lived in North America for 16 million years, which may be one reason their fossils are more common and why Templeton initially thought he had found a mastodon tusk.
Mastodon or mammoth, both are exceptional finds when you come across one. It took just the right conditions to fossilize something as big as these giants.
“It takes a certain kind of chemical environment to preserve it, but it also takes a disaster to bury it quickly,” said James Starnes, a geologist with the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality.
The tusk is 2.13 meters long and weighs hundreds of kilos.
The tusk weighs several hundred pounds, so Templeton needed help moving it, so he contacted Starnes.
It was about 8:30 a.m. when Starnes got the text. He and his colleagues are used to dealing with what he calls fossil emergencies.
“Our wives know that at any moment we could be called to get one of these things,” Starnes said.
It was important to move the tusk quickly so that it would not be spoiled by the heat.
To preserve the tusk and transport it with minimal damage, Starnes, Templeton and Jonathan Leard, another MDEQ worker, covered it with foil and fashioned a jacket of burlap and plaster. With the plaster covering, it weighed 600 pounds.
They had to hoist the load up a truck over a fifteen-metre high cliff.
“It took all day,” Starnes said.
Experts can learn a lot from the tusk.
Templeton’s discovery is exciting for several reasons.
First, it’s rare — “we don’t really have a lot of these animals represented in our fossil record,” Starnes said. And second, it’s nearly complete, including the tip of the tusk.
The fact that it was a tusk is also good news for experts, because tusks contain much more information about a mammoth than, say, a shin bone.
“By studying the tusk, we can learn more about the entire life of this animal,” Starnes said.
Mammoths built up layers in their tusks each year that looked like annual rings, so they could keep track of where they were and whether there was enough food.
Although research on the tusk is still in its infancy, previous research on other mammoth tusks shows how much Starnes and his colleagues can learn.
Earlier this year, scientists published a paper tracing the movements of a 14,000-year-old woolly mammoth across Canada and Alaska based on an analysis of only its tusk.
The tusk will hopefully be ready to go on display at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science’s fossil roadshow in March, Starnes said. But it will need to be repaired first, since it cracked during transport.
The rest of the mammoth could still be in the river.
The tusk is just one part of a larger story. The layers of sediment around it, for example, give Starnes some clues about how the fossil ended up on the creek bank in the first place.
“We know by studying the geology around it exactly what happened,” he said. “It tells us a very, very detailed story.”
He said the mammoth likely ended up in the creek and died before its carcass was washed away and buried, dislodging the tusk.
It’s not uncommon for tusks to separate from the rest of a mammoth skeleton. Even in well-preserved frozen specimens, the tusks often fall off as they thaw, Starnes said.
Maybe some other lucky fossil hunter will find the rest of the skeleton. “Chances are, somewhere in that alluvium of that stream, the rest is there, probably not anywhere near there,” Starnes said.
Templeton has tips for other fossil hunters.
Templeton has been hunting fossils for decades and has picked up a few tips along the way. Templeton’s first tip is to simply be aware of the types of fossils you’re likely to find in your area. Many of his finds come from gravel beds in creeks.
“It’s good that people realize that these things are out there and just pay attention because anyone could have walked on it,” Templeton said of the tusk. “I didn’t do anything special.”
Templeton said it’s also important to share your findings with experts.
Starnes said he and his colleagues don’t have much time for field work, so they rely on amateur fossil hunters.
“The stuff that’s found here is just amazing,” Starnes said of the region’s fossils. “And like I said, the public is a big part of that. People who are interested in the world around them and collecting fossils add to our scientific knowledge.”
Read the original article on Business Insider