BISMARCK, N.D. — The first person to see it was a shovel operator working a night shift who saw a white glint as he scooped up a giant pile of dirt and dropped it into a dump truck.
Later, after the truck driver dumped the load, a bulldozer driver was ready to flatten the dirt but stopped to take a closer look when he, too, saw that patch of white.
Only then did the miners realize that they had unearthed something special: a more than two-meter-long mammoth tusk that had been buried for thousands of years.
“We were very lucky, lucky to find what we found,” said David Straley, president of North American Coal, which owns the mine.
The miners excavated the tusk from an ancient streambed, approximately 40 feet (12.1 meters) deep, at the Freedom Mine near Beulah, North Dakota. The 18,210 hectare surface mine produces up to 16 million tonnes (14.5 million tonnes) of lignite per year.
After spotting the tusk, crews stopped digging in the area and called in experts, who estimated the tusk was 10,000 to 100,000 years old.
Jeff Person, a paleontologist with the North Dakota Geological Survey, was among the commenters. He expressed surprise that the giant tusk had not sustained more damage considering the massive equipment used at the site.
“It's a miracle it came out virtually unscathed,” Person said.
A subsequent excavation at the discovery site found more bones. Person described it as a “trickle of finds,” with a total of more than 20 bones, including a shoulder blade, ribs, a tooth and parts of the hips, but it is probably the most complete mammoth found in North Dakota, where it was much occurs more often. unearth an isolated mammoth bone, tooth or piece of tusk.
“It's not a lot of bones compared to the number in the skeleton, but it's enough that we know this is all connected, and it's a lot more than we've ever found from one animal together, so that's really gave us something. meaning,” says Persoon.
Mammoths once roamed parts of Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. Specimens have been found in the United States and Canada, says Paul Ullmann, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of North Dakota.
The discovery of the mine is quite rare in North Dakota and the region because many remains of living animals were destroyed by glaciations and ice sheet movements during the last ice age, Ullmann said.
Other areas have yielded more mammoth remains, such as skeletal bone beds in Texas and South Dakota. People have even found frozen carcasses in the permafrost of Canada and Siberia, he said.
According to the Geological Survey, mammoths went extinct in what is now North Dakota about 10,000 years ago. They were larger than modern-day elephants and were covered in thick wool. Cave paintings dating back 13,000 years show mammoths.
Ullmann calls mammoths “media superstars almost as much as dinosaurs,” citing the “Ice Age” film franchise.
This ivory tusk, which weighs more than 22.6 kilograms, is considered fragile. It is wrapped in plastic while the paleontologists try to monitor how quickly it dries out. If it goes too fast, the bone can fall apart and be destroyed, Persoon said.
Other bones have also been wrapped in plastic and placed in drawers. The bones will remain in plastic for at least several months until scientists can figure out how to get the water out safely. The paleontologists will identify the mammoth species later, Person said.
The mining company plans to donate the bones to the state for educational purposes.
“Our goal is to give it to the kids,” Straley said.
North Dakota has a landscape primed for bones and fossils, including dinosaurs. Perhaps the best-known fossil from the state is that of Dakota, a mummified duck-billed dinosaur with fossilized skin, Ullmann said.
The state's rich fossil record is largely due to the landscape's “low-elevation, lush, ecologically productive environments in the past,” Ullmann said.
North Dakota's location, bordering the Rocky Mountains, puts the area in the way of eroding sediments and rivers, which have buried animal remains for 80 million years or more, he said.
“It was a perfect scenario where we have really productive environments with a lot of life, but we also had, geologically speaking, the perfect scenario to bury the remains,” Ullmann said.
