A hunter was looking for deer on a West Texas ranch last season when he came across an unusual object sticking out of a dry creek bed. The hunter told the ranch owner, Will Juett, that he thought it was some sort of fossil. Juett had his doubts, so he reached out to two people who might know more, Dr. Bryon Schroeder and archaeologist Erika Blecher with the Center for Big Bend Studies at nearby Sul Ros University.
The two researchers recruited a few more experts and headed to Juett’s property, the O2 Ranch, where they verified the hunter’s find as a prehistoric mammoth tusk, according to a university press release.
“It paid off big time,” Juett said of his decision to bring the researchers out. “When they confirmed what they had uncovered, I couldn’t believe it.”
Schroeder explained in the university’s announcement that there were no other bones nearby. He called it an “isolated tusk” that had somehow been separated from the rest of the mammoth’s remains.
Read Next: Alabama Fossil Hunter Finds 34-Million-Year-Old Whale Skull on Her Family Farm
After unearthing the prehistoric fossil, the team spent two days covering it in protective plaster and building a frame to transport it back to the Sul Ros campus in Alpine. The tusk is now being carbon dated, and those results are expected within the next few months, the press release notes. The only other mammoth tusk that’s been found in the Trans-Pecos region and carbon dated was uncovered in 1960, not long after the method was developed.
“There was a big range of error back then,” Schroeder said. “Now we can get it down to a narrower range within 500 years.”
This could help expand our understanding of mammoths in Texas and their natural history in the region. Although it’s a long way from the Arctic, where most wooly mammoth bones have been found, the Lone Star State was the long-ago home of Columbian mammoths, an even larger species that roamed across North America during the last Ice Age. Columbian mammoth fossils have been unearthed in several states, including California, Utah, and Nevada, and even as far south as Costa Rica, according to Smithsonian Magazine.
Read Next: The Earliest Alaskans Built Hunting Camps Along Woolly Mammoth Migration Routes
One of the biggest and most interesting concentrations of mammoth bones lies in Central Texas between the Bosque and Brazos Rivers, roughly 500 miles east of the O2 Ranch. Now the site of Waco Mammoth National Monument, the protected five-acre area is where archaeologists found the first (and, so far, the only) evidence of a “nursery herd” of Columbian mammoths. Although larger concentrations of bones have been found in other places, like South Dakota, the Waco discovery is significant because researchers now believe that all 26 of the mammoths died in a single catastrophic event — most likely a flash flood — roughly 29,000 years ago.