Another Mammoth Find
I don’t mean to beat a dead horse, or a really long deceased mammoth, but this story just keeps getting better.
Mike Full, the retired cop turned scuba-diving fossil hunter in McMinnville has scored yet another major fossil find in McMinnville. We showed you his amazing luck last season ago on Field Guide. He made an amazing find right in front of our camera during that story.
But he’s not done looking. This summer Chemeketa Community College students are helping out on the site and they’ve found a second mammoth tusk and its socket.
Mammoth tusk & socket
He’s found the first tusk and tusk socket in August of 1992, the tip of its jaw in July 1993 and the upper and lower left molars in July 1994. Here it is 2009 and now he’s found the other matching tusk & socket. They all lie close to one another and many of the pieces fit right into each other. So it’s pretty clear Mike’s discovered a single, nearly-intact mammoth which died on that spot. He couldn’t believe his luck when he found an entire mammoth tusk in the water of the South Yamhill River.
This tusk is a partial. It’s 2 feet long instead of 5 feet. But it included the tusk socket. Mike already has the other socket and full second tusk from this same animal. He did a little photo manipulation to show what this partial tusk and his full tusk will look like when reunited.
Mike and the students also found a bison vertebrae. And they’re not done looking yet. The digging continues this week.
Left: Mammoth tusk & Socket. Right: Partial Tusk re-joined. Photo illustration by Mike Full
