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A dodo huntsman made an astonishing discovery while diving in a Florida river — the fossilized mandibula of a mammoth .
John Kreatsoulas , who runsFossil Junkies Dig and Dive Charters , an organisation that runsfossil - hunt tripsfor the world , let out the intact fossil while search a surgical incision of the Peace River near the city of Arcadia .
John Kreatsoulas pulled the mammoth jaw up from the Peace River in Florida while diving for fossils.
He initially thought the detail was a log , but on closer inspection , realized it was a big mandible .
Kreatsoulas does n’t know exactly how old the specimen is , but believes it could be at least 10,000 twelvemonth old .
" I grabbed onto it just to hold on for a second , and I realise — ' wait for a second base , that ’s not a Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree , that was a mammoth jaw , ' " he toldNBC2 , a local Florida electric receptacle .
The mammoth jaw is at least 10,000 years old.
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Kreatsoulas is plan to take the lower jawbone to be clean and analyzed by experts in Tampa , who will be able to determine the fossil ’s years with radiocarbon dating . This is where researcher decide the tier of exceptional radioactive elements — often carbon 14 — in a fogy to puzzle out out when an brute died . The ivory will also be register with the State of Florida , so it may end up in a museum rather than in Kreatsoulas ' personal collection at home .
It ’s not bonk just what kind of mammoth the fossil belong to , but Columbian mammoths ( Mammuthus columbi ) dwell North America — and as far south as Costa Rica — during the Pleistocene epoch ( 2.6 million years to 11,700 years ago ) .
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The Columbian mammoth was likely a cross between the woolly mammoth ( Mammuthus primigenius ) and an unknown linage of mammoth that arrived in North America from Siberia around 1.5 million years ago , according to DNA research .
Columbian mammoth went extinct between 13,000 and 10,000 days ago , at theend of the last ice eld . warm temperatures caused a loss of home ground for these megafauna , which merge with mankind hunt go to huge universe declines .
This is n’t the first time mammoth fossil have been found in Florida ’s Peace River . In 2021,divers discovered a 4 - foot ( 1.2 beat ) mammoth leg bonein the water . Meanwhile , in northern Florida , researchers have unearth a 5.5 million - year - old"graveyard " of gomphothere , a four - tusk relation of modern elephants , that had belike drowned in a prehistorical river there .
