A mammoth discovery: Miners find ancient tusk and bones in North Dakota

It was a night like any other at the Freedom Mine near Beulah, North Dakota. A shovel operator was working the overnight shift, moving tons of dirt from an old streambed about 40 feet (12.1 meters) deep. He noticed a flash of white in his scoop but thought nothing of it and dumped it into a truck. A detailed report published by the said that the truck driver also saw the white object but was too busy to inspect it.

He drove to the dumping site and unloaded his cargo. A dozer driver was about to flatten the dirt when he decided to take a closer look at the white thing. He was stunned by what he saw: a 7 foot long (2.1 meters) mammoth tusk buried for thousands of years. He immediately alerted his colleagues and supervisors, who realized they had stumbled upon something special.

"We were very fortunate, lucky to find what we found," said David Straley, an executive of North American Coal, which owns the mine. The 45,000 acre (18,210 hectare) surface mine produces up to 16 million tons (14.5 million metric tons) of lignite coal annually. But that night, the miners had unearthed a priceless .

The miners stopped digging in the area and , who estimated the tusk to be 10,000 to 100,000 years old. Jeff Person, , was amazed by the condition of the tusk, given the heavy machinery used at the site. "It's miraculous that it came out pretty much unscathed," Person said. He and his team excavated further at the discovery site, hoping to find more bones.

They were satisfied. They found more than 20 bones, including a shoulder blade, ribs, a tooth, and parts of hips. They belonged to the same mammoth, making it the most complete specimen in North Dakota. "It's not a lot of bones compared to how many are in the skeleton, but it's enough that we know that this is all associated, and it's a lot more than we've ever found of one animal together, so that's really given us some significance," Person said.

Mammoths , woolly relatives of elephants that roamed across parts of Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. According to the survey, they went extinct about 10,000 years ago in what is now North Dakota. They were larger than elephants today and had long, curved tusks. They were depicted in cave paintings dating back 13,000 years.

Paul Ullmann, a University of North Dakota vertebrate paleontologist, said mammoths were "media superstars almost as much as dinosaurs," citing the "Ice Age" film franchise. He said the mine's discovery was fairly rare in North Dakota and the region, as many remains of animals alive during the last Ice Age were destroyed by glaciations and movements of ice sheets.

Other areas have yielded more mammoth remains, such as bonebeds of skeletons in Texas and South Dakota. People even have found frozen carcasses in the permafrost of Canada and Siberia, he said. The paleontologists were careful with the ivory tusk weighing over 50 pounds (22.6 kilograms), which is considered delicate.

The tusk has been covered in plastic to regulate the speed at which it dehydrates. According to Person, if it dehydrates too quickly, it may break apart and become irreparably damaged. Other bones have also been enveloped in plastic and are now stored in drawers. The bones will remain in plastic for several months until the scientists can identify a safe method to extract the water.

Person stated that the paleontologists will identify the mammoth species at a later stage. The mining company plans to donate the bones to the state for educational purposes. "Our goal is to give it to the kids," Straley said. The state of North Dakota boasts a terrain ideal for preserving bones and fossils, including those of dinosaurs.

According to Ullmann, among the well known fossils found in the state is that of Dakota, a duckbilled dinosaur whose skin has been fossilized and whose mummified remains have been discovered. Ullmann mentioned that the state's abundant fossil record is primarily a result of the productive ecological conditions that existed in low elevation and lush environments in the past.

Nationally adjacent to the Rocky Mountains, North Dakota has been exposed to eroding sediments and rivers that have preserved animal remains for over 80 million years. According to Ullmann, the state has been blessed with a favorable scenario where the environment was rich in life, and the geology was conducive to the burial of remains..