On Monday, a farmer named James Bristle made a “mammoth” of a find while he was was digging in a soybean field with a friend– and we don’t mean that figuratively. They discovered what they thought was an old wooden fence post—but it actually turned out to be a mammoth rib.
Although they didn’t figure that much out until later, after contacting the University of Michigan and being directed to Professor Dan Fisher, the director of the Museum of Paleontology. The university sent Fisher who confirmed the discovery.
“We get calls once or twice a year about new specimens like this,” Fisher told The Washington Post. However, most of those calls relate to mastodon fossils—to date, only 30 mammoths have been found in Michigan.
A rare discovery
This find was quite unusual. Adding to its peculiarity, Fisher and his team was given only one day to excavate the bones; Bristle had just recently purchased the farm, and was running on a tight schedule thanks to the harvest.
Which means the dig became a mad dash to complete the work all on Thursday.
“We didn’t stop to eat or drink,” Fisher told the Detroit Free Press. “It was a hard, hard day of work, but every bit worth it.”
“We don’t just want to pull the bones and tug everything out of the dirt,” Fisher added. “We want to get the context for how everything was placed at the site.” Context—like where the bones are relative to each other and what layer of sediment they are in—yield mounds of data researchers couldn’t get otherwise.
Apparently the effort was very much worthwhile, because these fossils were amongst the rarest ever found in Michigan—around 20% of the skeleton was recovered, including the skull, the tusks, ribs, the pelvis, and vertebrae. While this seems like a low number, it is in fact one of the most complete skeletons found to date.
We might learn more about humans, too
Other parts, like the hind limbs, are missing, probably eaten by ancient human hunters.
“We think we’re dealing with an animal that was at least butchered by humans,” Fisher said. He added that the humans might not have killed it, seemed to have preserved it.
According to Fisher, it appears that ancient humans in the area used ponds to preserve meat like a refrigerator—the carcasses were weighed down with boulders until they sank underwater.
“It was essentially stored meat,” he added. In this mammoth’s case, three large boulders were found onsite, along with stone tool fragments, pointing to this method.
The mammoth itself might be a wooly mammoth, but it could also be a Jeffersonian mammoth—which is a cross between a wooly and Columbian mammoth. Either way, it died around age 45 sometime between 11 and 15 thousand years ago, which—if humans are definitively shown to have been involved with the carcass—can shed new light on when the first humans first arrived in Michigan.
But as of now, with the bones freshly freed from the earth for the first time in thousands of years, few things are known for certain. The University of Michigan team doesn’t even know if they will be able to examine the bones fully, because they are actually Bristle’s property. As of Friday, Bristle hadn’t decided what he will do with them.
“To really make conclusions about these bones and what they mean, we have to make the evidence available for other scientists to study, too,” Fisher said. “And we can’t do that without long-term access to the material.”
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Image credit: YouTube/University of Michigan
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