Farmer finds woolly mammoth bones in his field

Professor Daniel Fisher, director and curator at its Museum of Paleontology, told CBS he knew exactly what it was when he saw the bones. Aside from the pelvis, they found the skull and two tusks, along with numerous vertebrae, ribs and both shoulder blades.

You may have read this week about the unbelievable find unearthed in a soybean field in Washtenaw County.

Bristle said that after excavating the bones, they thought it was a mud-covered, bent fence post. He pointed to three basketball-sized boulders that were recovered next to the skeletal remains that may have been used to anchor the carcass.

Mammoths and mastodons, another elephant-like creature, were common in North America before disappearing around 11,700 years ago.

A pre historic animal, a woolly mammoth has been discovered in a field in Michigan by a farmer and his friend who were digging in a field to put in a drainage pipe. Instead, it was part of a pelvis from an ancient woolly mammoth that lived up to 15,000 years ago. Further, the site holds “excellent evidence of human activity” associated with the mammoth remains, researchers say.

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

Study of the bones may shed light on when humans arrived in the Americas, a topic of debate among archaeologists. Fisher is a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

The farm’s owner, Jim Bristle, allowed people to visit before donating the remains to the University of Michigan’s Museum of Paleontology. “We get one or two calls like this a year, but majority are mastodons”, Prof Fisher said.

Bristle said the discovery is both exciting and disruptive. “Really it’s just the right thing to do”.

Bristle gave the U-M team one day to recover the remains. They’ve been driving into Chelsea, the closest town, and asking for directions.

Video footage showed the bones being recovered in a 10ft-deep pit by a team from the university.