Woolly mammoth fossil

Woolly mammoth fossil

Michigan was digging into a field for drainage purposes when, at a depth of about eight feet, they encountered a substance that looked like wood. As the Detroit Free Press reported, the farmers soon realized that they were beating not wood but bone.
​

Woolly mammoth fossil

Woolly mammoth fossil. Is it a ᴅιɴosᴀuʀ bone? They called the University of Michigan, who relayed the news to Daniel Fisher, at the school’s Museum of Paleontology. Upon arriving at the scene, Fisher determined that it wasn’t the farmers had found – it was a Mammoth.

Woolly mammoth fossil

Woolly mammoth fossil. Fisher and his colleague had just one day to uncover the Mammoth’s skeleton, because the farmers needed to get on with their work, according to the Free Press. They were able to find a head, tusks, ribs and some vertebrae; the missing pieces may have been taken away by humans who possibly κιʟʟᴇᴅ the creature for food.

Woolly mammoth fossil

There have been 30 or so other Mammoth found in the state, the Free Press reports; this one, Fisher told the paper, may be a Jeffersonian Mammoth —a hybrid that’s not quite a Woolly Mammoth and not quite a Columbian Mammoth, but still very large, very impressive, and very much not what you find doing fieldwork every day.