Monday - March 21, 2011

Tusk, Tusk

Texas Boys Discover ‘Fossil Gold Mine’

SHERMAN, Texas – For Andrew Carroll and Thomas Smith, two North Texas sixth-graders, the adventure began when they found a bone while exploring a creek southeast of Sherman.

“We all got excited because I knew it was too big to be a cow bone, so we knew it was a dinosaur bone,” Andrew said of himself and his Pottsboro Middle School classmate.

What it was, once the Dallas Paleontological Society investigated: the bone was a pelvis of a Columbian mammoth, one of the two largest species of mammoth.

“This area is a fossil gold mine,” society member Ed Swiatovy of Sherman told the Herald Democrat of Sherman and Denison for a story in Sunday editions. “At one time, it was under an inland sea. When it came to the end of the dinosaurs, when mammals took over, this area was grass plains and woodlands—everything that mammals like. This area has always been conducive to marine or mammal life forms.”

Society volunteers have excavated the area found by the boys, dinging a shoulder bone, fragments of two leg bones, a lower jaw with teeth and the back of a skull, Swiatovy said. All of the bones have been sent to the Museum of Nature & Science in Dallas for study and carbon dating.

A team of archaeologists from Southern Methodist University in Dallas surveyed the site for any signs of prehistoric human life but found none, he said.

I thought for a few minutes that I’d have some kind of illegal alien angle to play with on this story, since it’s a Columbian mammoth. But I have no idea where the name Columbia came from. Wiki says the critter lived only as far south as Central America, and that the ones around Nashville were a bit behind the times with the extinction notification, and managed to stay alive up to only 7800 years ago.

The Columbian mammoth was one of the largest of the mammoth species and also one of the largest elephants to have ever lived, measuring 4 metres (13 ft) tall and weighing up to 10 metric tons (11 short tons). It was 10.7 feet (3.3 m) long at the shoulder, and had a head that accounted for 12 to 25 percent of its body weight.[2] It had impressive, spiralled tusks which typically extended to 6.5 feet (2.0 m). A pair of Columbian Mammoth tusks discovered in central Texas was the largest ever found for any member of the elephant family: 16 feet (4.9 m) long.

Hmmph. Ok, this mammoth lived in Mexico, it’s smaller than the other mammoth, and the reconstruction depicts it as being relatively hairless. So can I work the Chihuahua angle then? “Yes, drop the chalupa!”

He also seems to have had a bit of an identity crisis, or else he was using false ID (ha! I can so work the illegal alien angle!) because Mammuthus Columbi was also known as Mammuthus Jeffersoni, i.e., the Jefferson mammoth.

And now for something not at all completely different. This is Isla Fisher. I know she’s been here before, but she’s just so darn cute I couldn’t resist.

Clic the Pic


Tired of Isla? Ok, this next one is Bryce Dallas Howard. She’s an actress who plays in this unknown bit of film called either Twilight or New Moon or something like that. Beats me.

GET ME OUT OF HERE ...

Posted by Drew458     on 03/21/2011 at 02:19 PM   
Filed Under: • Archeology / Anthropology • Eye-Candy •  
• Comments (2) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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