Farmer discovers mammoth bones in Washtenaw Co

A rare finding happened due to sheer luck, as woolly mammoth remains were found by accident in Michigan, when two farmers dug down to drain the water from a field in Lima Township. He added it was an adult male, 40 to 50 years old, and was likely 10 feet tall.

Extinct for a minimum of 10,000 years, the woolly mammoth lived during the Pleistocene epoch, and was one of the last in a line of mammoth species.

While the bones have not yet been dated, fisher says it may shed light on human activity in Michigan more than 11,000 years ago.

With the help of an excavator who agreed to donate their time, the University of Michigan researchers managed to recover the ancient animal’s skull, its long tusks, a pelvis bone, shoulder blades and even a few vertebrae and ribs.

Three boulders found near the remains could have been used as anchors to sink the carcass, Fisher said, and a small stone flake found next to a tusk could be evidence of a cutting tool.

He told Ann Arbor News that he new the find was “out of the norm”, to put it mildly. The bones of the mammoth were uncovered yet, but certainly there.

“We thought it was a bent fence post”.

On Thursday, paleontologists as well as Bristle’s friends and family unearthed twenty percent of the mammoth’s remains.

Two local farmers in Michigan were preparing for soybean planting when they recovered something unusual in the field – huge bones of an ancient woolly mammoth.

“We got down pretty quick to the level where they had found bones and saw that, as expected, there were more”, he told CBC Radio’s Afternoon Drive in an interview on Friday.

According to BBC, the Columbian mammoth lived in the southern parts of north America and also Mexico.

“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.

Although they didn’t figure that much out until later, after contacting the University of Michigan and being directed to Professor Dan Fisher, the director of the Museum of Paleontology.

Bristle said the discovery is both exciting and disruptive.