When Eddie Templeton was hunting for fossils along a Mississippi Creek in rural Madison County on Aug. 3, he stumbled upon something sticking out from a steep embankment. Getting a closer look, the avid artifact collector realized it was a tusk — or at least a portion of one from an ice-age elephant that lived at least tens of thousands of years ago.
Templeton realized he needed to act quickly because the modern-day elements were not on his side. According to the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ), the summer heat could dry out the tusk, destroying it.
Once members of MDEQ’s survey team arrived on the scene, they saw the fossil tusk was in amazing condition. After some digging, the discovery became even more amazing. The 7-foot-long tusk was fully intact.
“This makes it an extremely rare find for Mississippi,” MDEQ wrote in a blog post on Friday, Aug. 9. “Most fossil tusk ivory found around the state are just fragments and most are likely to be attributable to the more common mastodon.”
But was it a mastodon? The survey team was not sure and needed to get the tusk to the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, but that meant finding the safest way to remove the fossil.
To do so the team created a protective jacket for the tusk out of aluminum foil, plaster and strips of burlap, which all together weighed over 600 pounds.
After being lifted up a nearly vertical, 50-foot bluff, the tusk was taken to the museum where it was determined to belong not a mastodon, but to a Columbian mammoth.
“Eddie’s discovery offers a rare window into the Columbian mammoths that once roamed Madison County along the Jackson Prairie of central Mississippi,” MDEQ said.
According to MDEQ officials, Columbian mammoths were much larger than the woolly mammoth, growing up to 15 feet at the shoulder and weighing over 10 tons.
Templeton told ABC News the tusk ranks as one of his top two discoveries, along with an entire mandible of mastodon he found in 1996. He said he’s next hoping to find a mammoth tooth.
The museum said it plans to display the tusk fossil for at least a limited time in the future before it is sent to a yet-to-be-determined permanent location.
