Farmer opens barn to show woolly mammoth bones

Bones from an ancient woolly mammoth have been found on a farm in Michigan in America.

The bones are from an adult male mammoth that likely lived 11,700 to 15,000 years ago, though the remains have not yet been dated.

Daniel Fisher, a palaeontologist at the University of Michigan, stated that: “We think that humans were here and may have butchered and stashed the meat [in a pond] so that they could come back later for it”.

More than 200 people have stopped at Jim Bristle’s farm in Washtenaw County, west of Ann Arbor, since Friday.

“We didn’t know what it was, but we knew it was certainly a lot bigger than a cow bone”, said Bristle, who had called a neighbor to help him with installing the drain pipe.

Only a day was given to excavate the bones, as the farming season gets busy during the autumn months and Bristle doesn’t have much time to spare.

The paleontologists got right to work.

The palaeontologists managed to find the skull, pelvis, a few ribs, vertebrates, both tusks, and both shoulder blades which accounted for about 20 percent of the ice-age mammoth bones.

The American mastodon is the youngest and best-known species of the genus and disappeared from America 11-12,000 years ago as part of a mass extinction.

Tucked away behind the outward facing U-M Natural History Museum are the paleontology labs where Fisher and his team will study the bones and prepare them for public display. The site holds “excellent evidence of human activity” associated with the mammoth remains, he said. Abrasions have already been spotted on the skull that could have been the result of a fight with another mammoth, and fractures or cuts on bones could indicate that the creature was hunted and butchered by ancient humans. He together with other investigators bared the cranium plus a vast tusk out of your field. The neck vertebrae are also arranged in anatomical sequence, nearly as if someone had “chopped a big chunk out of the body and placed it in the pond for storage”, Fisher said.