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.
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On Vacation with Prehistoric Mammals
Sometimes work seems to follow me, even on vacation. There I stood in a museum in Los Angeles and found myself eye to eye with a prehistoric ground sloth.
Or at least its skeleton.
Extending from each paw were large vicious looking claws. It’s the first time I’ve seen sloth claws in the context of the skeleton of the entire animal.
And I couldn’t help but flash back to 2 summers ago when we watched the very same kind of claw be discovered before our very eyes during a Field Guide shoot in Oregon. As the cameras rolled, retired McMinnville cop Mike Full found a sloth claw while scuba diving in the South Yamhill River.
Compare the two claws. The Museum claw is on the left. Mike’s claw, on the right, appears even bigger than what’s on display in the museum.
Revealing Celilo
It appears we hit on something fascinating. The images of Celilo Falls at the bottom of the Columbia River are getting a lot of attention now. Even the Oregonian followed up on our report.
But Oregon Field Guide and the newspaper shared a common drawback in conveying those images in their most powerful form.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers actually produced 3-Dimensional stills of the submerged rock formations. You can put on 3-D glasses and see the actual depth of the drop-offs in the images.
But people don’t have 3-D glasses to watch TV or read the newspaper.
We did the next best thing. We learned that the Army Corps’ data could be fed into free software which allows you to change the “virtual camera angle.” You could drop to the floor of the river for instance, or hover way above it looking down.
Best of all, the software allows you to render your own movies creating a virtual flying tour moving along the river bottom.
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Breaking the camera jinx
If it comes down to skill or luck, I’ll take luck most any day.
In this case, I think we were with the luckiest fossil hunter in the state.
Mike Full, a retired McMinnville cop, doesn’t just find little clam shell fossils or imprints of leaves. He finds big stuff. Mammoth tusks, molars, shoulder blades and ribs. Parts of prehistoric bison and camel. He has the most amazing personal collection of fossils I’ve ever seen.
Most times when we do these stories, we come along only after the fossils have been found and we get the fortunate digger to bring us to the site of the find.
But Mike doesn’t dig for fossils. He swims for them. Actually, he scuba dives in search for the prehistoric past.
He agreed to let us tag along on a hunt. Mike donned his scuba gear, as did Oregon Field Guide videographer Michael Bendixen who also owns an underwater camera.
Mike’s neighbor, Amanda, bet him that he wouldn’t find anything significant while an Oregon Field Guide camera hovered over his shoulder. But only about 20 seconds into the dive Mike came up with a piece of bone. It was about a foot long and looked like quite a find to me. Mike said he was sure it was fossilized bone but he surprised me when he said he did not think it was that significant. 20 minutes later he popped back up out of the water spluttering and cheering. “This is the find of a lifetime!” he cried. “Look! It’s a giant sloth claw.”
Sure enough, his fingers had found something amazing hiding in the silt of the river.
Amanda lost the bet - and had to wash Mike’s car & his wife’s truck. Mike sent us a photo which shows she made good on the wager.
Mike’s got the fossil bug big time. He has studied how to handle and preserve them properly. Plus he’s taken geology classes to know more about what he’s finding. Most impressive of all, he’s not hoarding the fossil finds for himself. When they’re ready he’s donating much of it to the Condon Museum at the University of Oregon so far more people can benefit from his discoveries.
