‘Old Stump’ in Texas Tu...

While hunting in West Texas, a deer hunter spotted a strange object in a creek bed. Suspecting it might be a fossil, he took a photo and showed it to a ranch manager.

“I was skeptical,” O2 Ranch manager Will Juett said in a Sul Ross State University statement. “I figured it was likely just an old stump, but imagined how great it would be if he was right.”

The deer hunter was right, and the discovery was more than great, because it wasn’t just any fossil. An interdisciplinary team of researchers identified it as a mammoth tusk, an incredibly rare find for West Texas.

After seeing the hunter’s photograph, Juett contacted Center for Big Bend Studies (CBBS) director Bryon Schroeder and archaeologist Erika Blecha. They, in turn, reached out to Haley Bjorklund, a CBBS collaborator and University of Kansas graduate student specializing in environmental archaeology. After two other anthropologists joined their efforts, the researchers met at the ranch to investigate what the hunter had found. The team quickly identified the specimen as a mammoth tusk.

“When they confirmed what they had uncovered, I couldn’t believe it,” Juett said. Unfortunately, the mammoth tusk was isolated, meaning the researchers didn’t discover any other mammoth remains. Over the course of two days, the team wrapped the tusk in plaster-covered burlap and built a support frame to safely transport it to SRSU. Now the researchers plan on studying the tusk, including performing radiocarbon dating—a standard technique used to determine the age of organic material—to estimate when the mammoth lived.

“A local who subsequently wrote his PhD dissertation on it found one [a mammoth tusk] in Fort Stockton in the 1960s,” Schroeder said, adding that the specimen is currently the only mammoth tusk in Texas’ Trans-Pecos region to have been carbon-dated. “There was a big range of error [in carbon dating] back then. Now we can get it down to a narrower range within 500 years.”

While the statement doesn’t name a specific mammoth species, the tusk might have belonged to a Columbian mammoth, a distant cousin of the more familiar woolly mammoth. The shaggy elephantine animal could reach up to 13 feet in height (almost 4 meters) and weigh around 10 tons.

Columbian mammoths inhabited regions of North America, including modern-day Texas, before going extinct around 11,700 years ago along with many other Ice Age mammals. Though the reason behind the disappearance of the Ice Age’s iconic megafauna remains a hotly debated topic, scientists frequently cite climate change, and human hunting may have also played a role.

“Seeing that mammoth tusk just brings the ancient world to life,” Juett said. “Now, I can’t help but imagine that huge animal wandering around the hills on the O2 Ranch. My next thought is always about the people that faced those huge tusks with only a stone tool in their hand!”