Nearly 600-pound ice age mammoth tusk discovered in Mississippi

Amateur fossil hunter Eddie Templeton usually knows when he’s onto something. Having scoured creek banks in Mississippi since he was a kid, Templeton’s 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 paleontology curator kraken market 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.
"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."

Prior to Templeton’s discovery, only isolated teeth of the Columbian mammoth had been unearthed in Mississippi, making it a first-of-its-kind find for the region and offering a "rare window" into the giant ice age mammals that once roamed the area, according to a statement from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality.