A farmer was getting ready for the soybean harvest when he made a surprising discovery: wooly mammoth bones. At first they thought it was part of a decayed fence post, but it wasn’t long before they realized that what they were looking at was actually bone.
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People have been stopping by the farm all week, watching the dig which has been underway since Thursday morning. “My grandson came over to look at it, he’s 5 years old, he was speechless”.
They called the nearby University of Michigan, which in turn notified professor Dan Fisher, the director of the Museum of Paleontology in Ann Arbor.
Professor Fisher added that the woolly mammoth had lived between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago and had probably been hunted by humans, who then butchered it and left it in a pond.
One day was more than enough for Fisher and his team.
“We don’t just want to pull the bones and tug everything out of the dirt”, Fisher explained. Michigan. “We all got in the mud and had a lot of fun”.
There are a few things that make this particular mammoth exciting: It’s a very complete skeleton (although it’s missing its hind limbs, feet, and some other assorted parts), compared with most of the mammoths found in Michigan and surrounding areas. As the remains have been carefully extracted by paleontologists, they have more potential to be thoroughly studied than if someone had carelessly extracted them himself.
The university was notified about the discovery on Wednesday and their staff began excavation work at the scene the next day. As Bristle was only able to dedicate a limited amount of time to this endeavor, Fisher and his colleagues chose to take action.
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The bones will be cleaned and examined by university researchers for cut marks that would indicate human activity, Fisher said. “And we can’t do that without long-term access to the material”.
