When you purchase through links on our site , we may make an affiliate commission . Here ’s how it works .
A military man rambling through the wilds of Mississippi recently stumbled upon a spectacularly preserved gigantic tusk stay put out of a usurious cliff along a stream . The tusk is the first live gigantic dodo unearth in the region , scientists say .
inexpert fogey aggregator Eddie Templeton was walk in rural Madison County in other August when he encountered the ivory partially submerged in H2O and cling into the silt and stiff of the streambed . He contacted the Mississippi State Geological Survey , which hollow the fossil , Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality ( MDEQ)representatives enjoin in a statement .
The 600-pound tusk belonged to a Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi).
view scientists canvas the 7 - foot - long ( 2 meters ) , 600 - pound ( 270 kilograms ) ivory tusk , which was almost entirely integral , and confirmed it belonged to a Columbian mammoth ( Mammuthus columbi ) .
Related : Huge , complete mammoth ivory unexpectedly discovered by North Dakota ember miners
" When I learned it was a mammoth and not a mastodont , I suffer even more excited . I ’ve never found any part of a mammoth . I always hop to find a part of a mammoth , but that ’s pretty uncommon down here , " Templeton recount the local newspaperThe Clarion - Ledger .
James Starnes , a geologist with the MDEQ , tell The Clarion - Ledger that tusks generally " do n’t save well " in the area .
" This is not something you see every day , " he said . " This was a with child , gravid animal . "
dodo of gigantic relative such as American mastodons ( Mammut americanum ) are ground throughout Mississippi because they dine on a miscellany of plants and so lived in several eccentric of environments , but mammoths were choosy and grazed only in open grassland . As a result , only two region in the local sphere supported the majestic puppet .
Columbian mammoths lived during thePleistocene epoch(2.6 million to 11,700 years ago ) and crossed the Bering land bridge to enroll North America by about 1.5 million years ago , according to theNational Park Service(NPS ) . The lumber beasts could maturate to about 15 feet ( 4.5 m ) tall at the shoulder , harmonise to the instruction , and could consider up to 10 tons ( 9 metrical tons ) .
— Ancient chromosome from woolly mammoth discovered in 52,000 - year - old frost - dried hide
— That ’s a Brobdingnagian amount of movement for a single mammoth ' : wooly-minded female ’s gradation retraced based on chemistry of 14,000 - yr - old tusk
— missy get word 100,000 - year - old mammoth bones in Russian river while fish with daddy
Mammoths roamed across North America during the last ice age . As the glacier melted , their habitat wither . This , combined with human hunting , in all probability drove the iconic puppet to extinguishing , according to the NPS .
Columbian mammoths give way offbetween 13,000 and 11,000 years ago , while their close relatives , the wooly mammoth ( Mammuthus primigenius ) , clung on as a metal money for 6,000 years more .
The last known wooly mammoth survive on Wrangel Island , a Russian island off Alaska until around 3,700 age ago . A study earlier this year find that amystery event likely kill off these last holdouts . This contradicted earlier study , which proposed thatinbreeding led to " disastrous " DNAthat finally killed them .
