One way Eddie Templeton likes to spend time outdoors is by searching for fossils in rural Mississippi. Templeton recently made an incredible discovery—a 7-foot-long fully intact Columbian mammoth tusk, an “extremely rare find for Mississippi.”
“Earlier this week our . . . scientists received a message about a major fossil discovery made by Eddie Templeton, an avid artifact and fossil collector and friend of the Survey,” the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) said in a press release. “He was exploring in rural Madison County looking for fossils when he stumbled upon what appeared to be a portion of an ice-age elephant tusk exposed in a steep embankment.”
Templeton told ABC News that he assumed the tusk was from a mastodon. Mastodons were smaller than mammoths, but both animals had large ivory tusks. But it’s actually from a Columbian mammoth. These animals were particularly huge and could grow up to 15 feet tall and weigh over 10 tons (22,000 pounds).
“Mastodons are by far the most common . . . finds in Mississippi as they were browsers, like modern deer, and inhabited a variety of different environments,” MDEQ said in its release. “Mammoths which were related to modern elephants are far less common finds in Mississippi as they were open grassland grazers and would have been at home in only a select few environments, particularly the prairie regions of Mississippi.”
The tusk is the first find of its kind for the area.
Excavating the Mammoth Tusk
Templeton contacted the experts after he made his mammoth discovery. A paleontological team arrived to the fossil site and, alongside Templeton, spent a whole day removing the 7-foot-long fossil from the creek bed in its entirety.
“To our surprise, it had been deposited entirely intact,” MDEQ said. “This makes it an extremely rare . . . Most fossil tusk ivory found around the state are just fragments.”
After excavation, the team delivered the fossil to the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science for further evaluation.
See MDEQ’s post about the discovery of a rare mammoth tusk in Mississippi here: