Michigan farmer reaps surprising harvest – wooly mammoth fossils

Over the years, the remains of about 300 mastodons and 30 mammoths have been recovered in Michigan.

“My grandson came over to look at it, he’s five years old”, Bristle told the Ann Arbor News.

The University of Michigan reports that the partial remains of the animal were found in a farmer’s field, which is located about 16 kilometres southwest of Ann Arbor, Mich.

The woolly mammoth lived during the Pleistocene era, and was one of the last in a line of mammoth species.

“It was an adult male”, said Professor Fisher of the mammoth, “40 to 50 years of age, and stood probably 10 feet tall at the shoulder….It was probably about six to seven tons in weight”.

Fisher told Detroit Free Press. The bones of the mammoth will be scrutinized by researchers for cut marks that would point to human activity. They worked to excavate the skeleton with the farmers and local residents all day on Thursday, so as not to interfere with Bristle’s plans for the harvest.

The team said they believe the animal was placed in a pond for storage, explaining that two boulders found near the skeleton may have been used to anchor the carcass, the release said. Michigan. “We all got in the mud and had a lot of fun”.

All the same, paleontologists say the find most definitely trumps the scattered skeletal fragments that have so far been discovered in Michigan. And because it has been carefully extracted by paleontologists, it has the potential to be studied much more thoroughly than bones haphazardly pulled out of the ground. “Studying this mammoth could also potentially tell us more about the climate system, how it works and what kinds of changes happen over time, which is something very relevant to us right now”.

“We think we’re dealing with an animal that was at least butchered by humans”, even if the humans didn’t kill it, Fisher said. “He was in awe”, Bristle said.

To confirm that early humans in this corner of the world did in fact feed on this mammoth, the researcher team must wash the bones and inspect them for cut marks.

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The bones are currently in a shop on the farm, and the pit has now been filled in, Fisher said.