Quillback Posted August 19 Share Posted August 19 Amateur fossil hunter Eddie Templeton usually knows when he’s onto something. Having scoured creek banks in Mississippi since he was a kid, Templeton has made several stunning extinct mammal finds, including a mastodon mandible, numerous bones from a giant armadillo-relative, and even a saber-toothed cat’s foot bone. But his latest discovery may be the most unexpected. Templeton was wading through around 3 feet (almost 1 meter) of water in a creek in Madison County on August 3 when he stumbled across a giant tusk partially exposed from the mud bank. The conditions weren’t great for fossil hunting, he said — the water had been blocked from draining downstream and there were no exposed gravel bars — so he hadn’t anticipated making a find of any particular importance that day. Coming across the 7-foot-long (2.1-meter-long) tusk, which turned out to be completely intact, and sharing it with George Phillips, the curator of paleontology at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, proved him wrong. Phillips confirmed the tusk belonged to a Columbian mammoth, a distant relative of the woolly mammoth. Columbian mammoths lived during the end of the Pleistocene Epoch, making the fossil anywhere from about 11,700 to 75,000 years old, Phillips said. The tusk, which could be anywhere from 11,700 to 75,000 years old, was found partially exposed from the mud bank. - Courtesy Eddie Templeton “It was exciting to find a big piece of a tusk, certainly. But it was particularly exciting that it was a mammoth,” Templeton told CNN. “After the geologists got there, and we started uncovering it and realized that it was the entire tusk, from tip to base, it was even more exciting. So things just got better as the day went on.” dpitt, snagged in outlet 3, ness and 3 others 6 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Foghorn Posted August 19 Share Posted August 19 Awesome. I thought it was an old tire at first glance. ness and Quillback 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Quillback Posted August 20 Author Share Posted August 20 9 hours ago, Foghorn said: Awesome. I thought it was an old tire at first glance. Yeah, I'd probably think it was a piece of junk. Daryk Campbell Sr 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fishinwrench Posted August 20 Share Posted August 20 10 hours ago, Quillback said: Yeah, I'd probably think it was a piece of junk. Got me more closely studying that tree root in the back yard, that keeps bending my mower blade ! 🤔 Quillback 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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