Mammoth tusk discovery: Rare find in Mississippi stream
Most fossil hunters can only dream of such a discovery, so Eddie Templeton can consider himself very lucky. While wading in a stream in Mississippi, the man stumbled upon a mammoth tusk over 2 metres long.
Eddie Templeton is an avid collector of artifacts and fossils. Exploring the rural areas of Madison County, he came across what appeared to be an exposed fragment of an Ice Age elephant tusk.
The man immediately contacted the paleontological team at the State Survey. The Mississippi Museum of Natural Science also provided the necessary materials to properly excavate and stabilize the find.
The discoverer and the paleontological team worked all day manually removing the clayey sand from the find, allowing them to extract an intact tusk over 2 metres long from the mud.
“To our surprise, it was deposited in an undisturbed state. This makes it an extremely rare find for Mississippi,” emphasized experts from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality.
According to George Phillips from the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, it is a Columbian mammoth tusk related to the woolly mammoth. These animals lived in the late Pleistocene epoch, so their fossils can be between 11,700 and 75,000 years old.
Columbian mammoths were much larger than woolly mammoths, which roamed North America's cooler, more northern regions. These mammals played a crucial role in maintaining the rich, fertile prairie ecosystem, similar to their modern relatives, elephants, in other parts of the world.
Eddie Templeton's find is the first of its kind in the entire region. The Columbian mammoth probably weighed over 10,000 kilograms and could grow up to 4 metres tall. The exhibit has been sent to the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science.
