cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/24698265

A hunter found a mammoth tusk sticking out of a creek bed on a ranch in the Big Bend region. There is an interview with Bryon Schroeder, director of the Center for Big Bend Studies at Sol Ross (a Texas university), on the linked page, but I’ll add a few quotes:

How could this be overlooked for so long? It must be just that remote.

I think it’s that remote and there’s not that many people out there. I think these hunters had a little serendipity involved. These guys were out, you know, the right place at the right time.

It could have also just been dislodged rather recently because, I mean, it was in the creek drainage. So it could have just been exposed that quickly.

And it was it was it known that prior to this discovery mammoths lived in this region or what?

Yeah, so Harvard, with Sul Ross, did a very early, very large study out here in the late 1920s, early ’30s. And they knew about a lot of mammoths, and we’ve been actually trying to find those mammoth localities. And we just haven’t had a ton of luck.

And so people knew about them, but nobody’s ever dated them. Nobody’s ever really found one and figured out, you know, which part of the Pleistocene we’re talking about. Because at some point, mammoths get over here before people do.

You know, are these too early? Are these the right age for being associated with humans? And we’ve just not done that work because we just haven’t been able to find those localities.

How rare is this discovery? I mean, when was the last time a discovery like this was made out in your neck of the woods?

Uh, I’m sure there’s probably some ranchers out here that probably know where a lot of mammoths are on their land.

They just haven’t rang you up yet.

Yeah, haven’t rang me up. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years and I’ve seen one. I’ve seen this one. So they’re fairly rare.