Rare mammoth tusk found in Mississippi is the first of its kind

Madison County, Mississippi – Mississippi Man I found a fang One of the largest mammals to ever walk the state's land: the mammoth.

The discovery in Madison County is the first giant mammoth tusk ever documented in Mississippi, in part because the animals were rarer than the smaller mastodons and woolly mammoths.

“I always hoped to find a mammoth part, but this is very rare here,” said Eddie Templeton, a Madison County resident who regularly searches for fossils along area riverbeds.

The giant mammoth lived between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago, during the end of what is commonly referred to as the Ice Age.

“I knew it was a tusk” when he saw it, Templeton said, and notified the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality’s Geology Office and the Mississippi Museum of Natural Sciences. But “it didn’t occur to me that it could be a giant tusk,” he said. instead of mastodon “It was a tusk until later. When I learned it was a mammoth and not a mastodon, I was even more excited.”

Over the years, Templeton said he has found many other fossils, including: Fossilized bone of a sharp-toothed catIt is commonly called the saber-toothed tiger.

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Experts said the tusk discovered by Templeton was impressive because of its large size and the rarity of giant mammoths in what is now Mississippi.

“This is a very important find for Mississippi,” said Mississippi State Geologist James Starnes. “It's very rare here in general. Tusks are not well preserved.”

Finding any part of a tusk is rare, but mammoth tusks are particularly rare.

Mastodon fossils are more common to find, Starnes said, because these animals can live in a variety of habitats, while mammoths were more specialized and needed open grasslands to feed and had less suitable habitat than mastodons, making their numbers smaller.

“This is not something you see every day,” Starnes said. “It’s amazing when it comes to Ice Age fossils.”

The tusk Templeton found is so large that it came from a Columbian mammoth, an animal that could stand 15 feet tall at the shoulder and weigh more than 10 tons. woolly mammothbesides MastodonIt stood about 9 to 10 feet tall at the shoulder, according to the National Park Service.

“This was a very large animal. The woolly mammoth would have been dwarfed by that,” Starnes said, adding that it was the largest known mammal to ever walk the land that is now Mississippi.

What happens to the mammoth tusk next?

Templeton, Starnes, and Jonathan Liard of the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality extracted the tusk and built a plaster case around it to protect it. It was then transported to the Mississippi Museum of Natural Sciences and delivered to paleontologist George Phillips.

This is the first Columbian mammoth tusk to be officially documented in the state, Phillips said, adding that it was just a matter of time before it was found.

“We have a lot of mammoth teeth, so it was inevitable that a tusk would show up,” Phillips said. “It's an impressive find. We knew it would show up sooner or later.”

Phillips said the tusk will be left to dry and then preserved by being covered in a special type of glue. While it is a very important discovery, it is difficult to predict when it will be displayed to the public because the process is slow.

“Everyone wants to know about it, and we are now focusing on other exhibitions,” Phillips said.

This article originally appeared on the Mississippi Clarion Ledger: Giant mammoth tusk found in Mississippi is the first of its kind