A find of mammoth proportions: Cullman diver finds prehistoric leg bone
Aug. 15—It was a find of mammoth proportions.
Cullman police officer David Brooks was diving in the shallow waters of Venice Beach, Fla., "The Shark Tooth Capitol of the World," eyes alert for hidden treasures. He had dived here before, along with others from the North Alabama Dive Center, and recovered sharks teeth and the giant teeth of megalodons — the largest shark to ever prowl the seas, now extinct.
"We find stuff like teeth and other fossils," he said.
On this dive, on Saturday Aug. 7, he noted about four square inches of something sticking up from where he was diving about 30 feet under water.
"I didn't know what it was, it kind of looked funky," he said. "I noticed it wasn't a rock and it wasn't something normal. So I decided to start digging and revealing more and more of it."
It turned out to be a nearly intact Colombian mammoth leg bone, likely a tibia.
"The boat captains we go out with, they've been doing it their whole lives, and they'll say, 'this is this," said Brooks. "They've been doing it so long they know what it is."
It's not the first time a mammoth fossil has been found there — the North Alabama Dive Center group has found pieces of tusks before. But they've never uncovered anything like the 30-inch, 50 pound leg bone, broken into two pieces.
"Our goal when we go is to find teeth, sharks teeth, megalodon teeth," said Jennifer Parker, one of the two owners of the dive shop. They have also found prehistoric whale bones, a mammoth tusk, sting ray barbs and bones from other animals.
"Never have we found anything like this," she said.
Mammothus columbi arrived in North America about a million years ago and was one of the largest mammoths around, standing up to 14 feet high at the shoulder and sporting tusks as long as 16 feet. It became extinct anywhere from 10,000 to 13,000 years ago.
The area where the bone was found was a prehistoric river that came out of Georgia, wound through Florida and about 160 miles down to the old coast line, said dive shop owner Eric Parker. "They don't know if it was deep and bones ended up in the river, or if was shallow. They lean more on the shallow side because you can dig a few inches and you're in like river rock. So it probably died where he found it," he said.
It took Brooks 45 minutes to dig the bone out using his hands and his knife. Cody Hipp, one of the assistant dive instructors along with Brooks, helped uncover it and get it to the surface.
The bone is now on display at North Alabama Dive Center.
"It's just a once in a life-time thing," said Jennifer.
The dive center has been going to Venice for the past three years, taking groups of about 20 divers. It's a popular trip, they said.
And now they can't wait to get back there. "We've all been planning this, how can we go back and find the rest of this?" said Brooks.
"We've already got our trip planned for next year," said Jennifer. "As soon as we got back, we had so many people that went on this trip that found so much stuff that they were like, 'we're going back. When are we going?'"
