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Amateur fossil hunter Eddie Templeton usually knows when he’s found something. Having combed Mississippi stream banks since he was a kid, Templeton has made some striking finds of extinct mammals, including a mastodon lower jaw, scores of bones from a giant armadillo relative, and even a foot bone from a saber-toothed cat. But his latest discovery may be the most unexpected.
Templeton was wading through about 3 feet (about 1 meter) of water in a Madison County creek on Aug. 3 when he came across a giant ivory partially exposed in the mud bank. He said conditions weren’t great for fossil hunting — water was blocked from flowing downstream and there were no exposed gravel bars — so he didn’t expect to make any significant finds that day. He was proven wrong when he came across the 7-foot (2.1-meter)-long ivory that turned out to be completely intact and shared it with George Phillips, curator of paleontology at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Sciences.
Phillips confirmed that the ivory belonged to a Columbian mammoth, a distant relative of the woolly mammoth. Columbian mammoths lived during the late Pleistocene Epoch and the fossil is about 11,700 to 75,000 years old, Phillips said.
“It was exciting to find a big piece of ivory, for sure. But it was especially exciting that it was a mammoth,” Templeton told CNN. “When the geologists got there and we started exposing it and realized it was all ivory, edge to edge, it was even more exciting. So it just got better and better as the day went on.”
Before Templeton’s discovery, only isolated Columbian mammoth teeth had been found in Mississippi. This is the first of its kind for the region and offers a “rare window” into the giant ice age mammals that once roamed the region, according to the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality.
Discovering Mississippi mammoths
The giant Columbian mammoth, which weighed more than 22,000 pounds (10 tons) and could reach more than 13 feet (4 meters) in length, lived alongside the mastodon in North America, Phillips said, and its diet consisted largely of grasses found in grassland biomes and rare at the time along what is now the east coast of the United States. As a result, its fossils are much harder to find in the region.
“For every, say, 25 fragments or entire teeth of an American mastodon, we find at best maybe one mammoth tooth. So mammoths are proportionately rare, not just in terms of mastodons, but in terms of everything else,” Phillips said.
When Templeton first encountered the giant tooth, he assumed it belonged to a mastodon, having found several remains of the creature on previous hunts. After the local museum and the state geology office helped him unearth the massive remains, Templeton began to have second thoughts, mostly because of the fossil’s distinct curve.
Phillips said the Columbian mammoth’s teeth were so curved that two of them could form an almost complete circle, whereas the teeth of common mastodons were not nearly as curved. The museum has numerous mammoth tooth fragments and even a few complete teeth — perhaps even some tooth fragments that are indistinguishable from the giant mammal’s mastodon — but he added that a complete, intact tooth like the one discovered is particularly rare.
“When I saw the photo, my jaw dropped,” Phillips said. “I thought, ‘Okay, okay, great, it’s an ivory. Wait a second… it’s so curved. Oh my God, it’s a mammoth tusk.'”
As field scientists removed the fossils, they simultaneously covered the exposed fragments with plaster to protect them during excavation. Templeton said the teeth grow in rings, similar to how trees grow, which makes the fossils more likely to break apart when they dry out from the moist sediments in which they were found.
The ivory, which weighs 600 pounds (272 kilograms) with its plaster jacket, is currently at the museum, where experts will watch closely as it dries and then treat it with a glue to preserve it. Scientists will also need to reattach the fragile fossil, which broke into two pieces during transport. Phillips said he hopes to have the ivory on display in time for the museum’s annual Fossil Roadshow, which will be held in the first week of March next year.
“I think most people are curious about the past, and people are fascinated by this megafauna that existed during the ice age,” Templeton said. “I’m sure there have been mammoth tusk fragments in Mississippi, but they probably haven’t been identified as mammoths because they’re just fragments. But this is the first complete mammoth tusk found in Mississippi. And that’s pretty cool.”
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