Almost complete mammoth skeleton found on Michigan soy farm

The bones are said to have been found when farmer James Bristle and a friend were digging to place drainage tiles.

“Most of the mammoth finds in Michigan are not as complete as the remains uncovered by the University of Michigan team”, researcher Daniel Fisher commented on this chance discovery in an interview.

“It’s a pretty exciting day”, James Bollinger, an excavator and local resident who lent his services to the dig, told the Free Press Thursday.

“As best we’ve been able to interpret it, ancient humans living in these areas and subsisting on these kinds of animals, among others, would in many cases hunt these animals, in other cases perhaps scavenge carcasses of such animals”.

They called University of Michigan which sent a team of researchers on the location led by Dan Fisher, a professor at the University of Michigan and the director of the Museum of Paleontology.

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Mammoths and mastodons, which are another elephant-like prehistoric creature, once roamed North America before disappearing about 11,700 years ago.

Its killing by humans explains parts of the mammoth that were missing – they were likely eaten, the expert said. Heavy boulders have been found near mammoth bones before, and researchers believe they were used to weigh down the heavy animals they could be covered by water. The remains found included its skull, jaw, vertebrae, and ribs. Study of the bones may shed light on when humans arrived in the Americas, a topic of debate among archaeologists.

“We knew it was something that was out of the norm”, Bristle told Ann Arbor News.

“My grandson came over to look at it, he’s five years old”, Bristle told the Ann Arbor News. “He was in awe”, Bristle said.

The next step is to have the remains cleaned and dried for further analysis, but as of now Bristle is the owner of the mammoth bones until he approves that they can be donated to science. After the bones were recovered, the pit was refilled.