Miners find millennia-old mammoth tusk bigger than them. Then experts start digging
In the middle of the night last May, a coal mining shovel operator spied something white in a dirt mound.
But he continued working his overnight shift at the Freedom Mine near Beulah, North Dakota, about 80 miles northwest of Bismarck.
Later, a dozer driver noticed the same thing. He was about to flatten the load of dirt when he stopped.
The coal miners took a closer look. It was a 7-foot-long tusk, weighing more than 50 pounds, experts say.
Experts from the North Dakota Geological Survey, the State Historical Society of North Dakota and the Bureau of Land Management headed to the mine to take a look, according to a Dec. 18 press release.
They found the tusk belonged to a mammoth and was likely between 10,000 and 100,000 years old.
“It’s miraculous that it came out pretty much unscathed,” paleontologist Jeff Person from the North Dakota Geological Survey told The Associated Press.
For the next twelve days, the mine was roped off while paleontologists excavated the area.
They found more than twenty bones from the skeleton, according to the release, including ribs, a shoulder blade, a tooth, and parts of the hips.
“It’s a lot more than we’ve ever found of one animal together,” Person told the AP.
“Most of the mammoth fossils known from North Dakota are isolated bones and teeth,” Clint Boyd, Senior Paleontologist for the North Dakota Geological Survey, said in the news release. “This specimen is one of the most complete mammoth skeletons discovered in North Dakota, making it an exciting and scientifically important discovery.”
Mammoths were gigantic furry elephants from the Ice Age that roamed across parts of Africa, Asia, Europe and North America before going extinct around 10,000 years ago.
Mammoth remains are more common discoveries in Texas and South Dakota than in North Dakota, the AP reported. A discovery like this is rare.
Currently, experts are in the process of cleaning and stabilizing the bones they found. According to the release, the North Dakota Geological Survey and the Freedom Mine want to integrate the fossils they found into an educational outreach program and eventually put them on public display.
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