‘Outdated Stump’ in Texas Turns Out to Be Extremely Uncommon Mammoth Tusk

Whereas looking in West Texas, a deer hunter noticed an odd object in a creek mattress. Suspecting it could be a fossil, he took a photograph and confirmed it to a ranch supervisor.

“I used to be skeptical,” O2 Ranch supervisor Will Juett mentioned in a Sul Ross State College statement. “I figured it was seemingly simply an previous stump, however imagined how nice it could be if he was proper.”

The deer hunter was proper, and the invention was greater than nice, as a result of it wasn’t simply any fossil. An interdisciplinary group of researchers recognized it as a mammoth tusk, an extremely uncommon discover for West Texas.

After seeing the hunter’s {photograph}, Juett contacted Heart for Large Bend Research (CBBS) director Bryon Schroeder and archaeologist Erika Blecha. They, in flip, reached out to Haley Bjorklund, a CBBS collaborator and College of Kansas graduate scholar specializing in environmental archaeology. After two different anthropologists joined their efforts, the researchers met on the ranch to research what the hunter had discovered. The group shortly recognized the specimen as a mammoth tusk.

“After they confirmed what that they had uncovered, I couldn’t consider it,” Juett mentioned. Sadly, the mammoth tusk was remoted, which means the researchers didn’t uncover another mammoth stays. Over the course of two days, the group wrapped the tusk in plaster-covered burlap and constructed a assist body to soundly transport it to SRSU. Now the researchers plan on learning the tusk, together with performing radiocarbon relationship—a normal method used to find out the age of natural materials—to estimate when the mammoth lived.

“A neighborhood who subsequently wrote his PhD dissertation on it discovered one [a mammoth tusk] in Fort Stockton within the Sixties,” Schroeder mentioned, including that the specimen is presently the one mammoth tusk in Texas’ Trans-Pecos area to have been carbon-dated. “There was a wide array of error [in carbon dating] again then. Now we are able to get it right down to a narrower vary inside 500 years.”

Whereas the assertion doesn’t title a selected mammoth species, the tusk might need belonged to a Columbian mammoth, a distant cousin of the extra acquainted woolly mammoth. The shaggy elephantine animal might attain as much as 13 ft in top (nearly 4 meters) and weigh round 10 tons.

Columbian mammoths inhabited areas of North America, together with modern-day Texas, earlier than going extinct round 11,700 years in the past together with many other Ice Age mammals. Although the explanation behind the disappearance of the Ice Age’s iconic megafauna stays a hotly debated matter, scientists steadily cite local weather change, and human hunting might have additionally performed a task.

“Seeing that mammoth tusk simply brings the traditional world to life,” Juett mentioned. “Now, I can’t assist however think about that massive animal wandering across the hills on the O2 Ranch. My subsequent thought is at all times concerning the those that confronted these big tusks with solely a stone device of their hand!”