Michigan Farmer Unearths Rare, Ancient Woolly Mammoth Skeleton

Farmer and landowner James Bristle made the discovery on Monday night when he and a friend were digging in one of his wheat fields to install a drainage pipe, according to a news release sent to ABC News by the University of Michigan.

“We think that humans were here and may have butchered and stashed the meat so that they could come back later for it”, Daniel Fisher, the scientist who led the dig, said Friday. Fisher was ecstatic about the find and called Bristle for permission to retrieve the rest of the mammoth from the farmer’s land.

Bristle told reporters that when they first unearthed the almost 15,000 years old woolly mammoth’s remains that thought it was a bent fence post smeared with mud.

He said the recovered bones include its skull, jaw, tusks and many of its vertebrae and ribs, along with a few of its shoulder blades, a few of its pelvis and a kneecap.

The challenge now is to find the rest of it.

“What we found here is a partial skeleton of a woolly mammoth”.

That turned out to be one of the mammoth’s ribs.

A team of University of Michigan paleontologists and an excavator who donated his time worked all day at the site in Lima Township, roughly 10 miles southwest of Ann Arbor and several miles from the town of Chelsea.

“We didn’t stop to eat or drink”. About 8 feet down, the Detroit Free Press reports, they struck bone and realized something large was buried in their midst. Researchers say that the animal, with its enormous tusks and trunk, looked a bit like a furrier version of the modern-day elephant, and it actually co-existed alongside humans before its extinction. Fisher said “We don’t just want to pull the bones and tug everything out of the dirt”.

The remains of the mammoth are now being stored in a shop on the farm and the pit has since been filled.

The team’s working hypothesis is that ancient humans placed the mammoth remains in a pond for storage. “He was in awe”, Bristle said.

“We’ve seen this sort of thing at other sites before”, Fisher said Friday.