SEATTLE (Reuters) — Construction workers
digging in a Seattle neighborhood have found the curved tusk of a
mammoth, an ancient elephant relative that inhabited North America at
least 10,000 years ago during the Ice Age.
Seattle's Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture said its
paleontologists were confident that the fossil, uncovered on
Tuesday, came from an Ice Age mammoth.
"The discovery of a mammoth tusk in South Lake Union is a rare
opportunity to directly study Seattle's ancient natural history,"
said museum curator Christian Sidor.
Crews were excavating for plumbing trenches in the city's bustling
South Lake Union neighborhood when they found the tusk about 40 feet
beneath ground level, said Jeff Estep, president of Transit Plumbing
Inc, the subcontracting company involved in the dig.
An apartment building is slated to be built on the site where the
discovery was made, Estep said.
"They hit something hard, uncovered it and saw it was long and a
weird shape," Estep said. "They kept uncovering it by hand and
realized it was a tusk."
The fossil was found on private property and likely not associated
with an archaeological site, leaving it up to the landowner to
decide what to do with the finding, according to the museum.
"If it went onto someone's mantelpiece, it would be a little bit of
a loss for the community," Sidor said. "Our hope is the fossil will
be donated to a public depository like a museum."
Five feet of the husk was excavated on Tuesday, and since then more
of it has been uncovered, Sidor said. It remains in the ground where
it was found, he said.
The Ice Age typically refers to the Pleistocene epoch, which began
about 1.6 million years ago and ended about 11,000 years ago.
The mammoth that had the tusk appears to have lived between 16,000
and 60,000 years ago, which is the tail end of the Pleistocene
epoch, Sidor said.
Mammoths, which were closely related to elephants, grew up to 12
feet at the shoulder and had a pair of long tusks that curved down
from the face and upward at their ends. They arrived in North
America from Asia about 2 million years ago, according to the
museum.
They became extinct as the glaciers receded at the end of the Ice
Age, the museum said.
(Additional reporting by Jonathan Kaminsky in Olympia;
editing by
Alex Dobuzinskis, Amanda Kwan and Richard Chang)
