During Memorial Day weekend in a North Dakota mine, coal miners stumbled upon a significant piece of natural history. A long mammoth tusk that had been buried in the Freedom Mine since the Ice Age was discovered while extracting dirt and rock with a bulldozer, the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) said in a news release.
Prompted by the discovery, state researchers and paleontologists from the North Dakota Geological survey worked together to turn the mine—near Beulah, North Dakota—into an archeological dig site.
Working close to two weeks to unearth the specimens from the streambed left them with more than 20 additional bones, including: ribs, a shoulder blade, a tooth, and parts of the hips.
“You don’t really expect to see this full curved tusk just laying there in perfect condition after being dumped out of the back of a dump truck,” Clint Boyd, senior paleontologist for the North Dakota Geological Survey, told a Washington, DC news source.
According to the DMR, two species of mammoths roamed North Dakota during the Ice Age: the Woolly Mammoths and the Columbian Mammoths. They walked among saber-tooth tigers and giant sloths, and went extinct in this area about 10,000 years ago.
“Most of the mammoth fossils known from North Dakota are isolated bones and teeth,” said Boyd. “This specimen is one of the most complete mammoth skeletons discovered in North Dakota, making it an exciting and scientifically important discovery."
The discovery was then transported to the Paleontology Lab at the North Dakota Heritage Center & State Museum in Bismarck, North Dakota, DMR said in their news release. Once at the museum, they will be cleaned and stabilized.
The North Dakota Geological Survey and the Freedom Mine are also working together to develop some form of an educational outreach program, and are thinking of locations where the specimen can be viewed by the public, DMR added. And once the discovery is cleaned and examined, researchers will be able to identify which species of mammoth it is.