Posted on 11/23/2021 11:10:38 AM PST by nickcarraway
Researchers with Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) found and extracted a mammoth tusk deep under the ocean.
According to MBARI, their team spotted the tusk 185 miles offshore and 10,000 feet deep on top of a seamount in 2019. They returned on July 2021 to bring the tusk to the surface.
"The researchers have confirmed that the tusk—about one meter (just over three feet) in length—is from a Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi)," reported the institute. They believe it could be the oldest well-preserved mammoth tusk recovered from this area of North America.
The Columbian mammoth went extinct around 11,500 years ago. The cold temperature and high-pressure environment preserved the tusk and now give researchers the opportunity to study it in greater detail.
“This specimen’s deep-sea preservational environment is different from almost anything we have seen elsewhere,” said University of Michigan paleontologist Daniel Fisher, who specializes in the study of mammoths and mastodons. “Other mammoths have been retrieved from the ocean, but generally not from depths of more than a few tens of meters.”
Scientists from University of California, Santa Cruz and University of Michigan are now studying the tusk for more information about the animal's history.
I remember an anecdote about a convention (probably in USSR? Russia?) where the meat shipment got hung up somewhere, so the locals were hired to hunt up (literally) enough meat. The food was delicious, everyone raved about it, turned out, they’d found a frozen mammoth and cut it up like Fred Flintstone’s takeout place. Not sure I believe this story, of course.
19th century billiard balls were sometimes carved of mammoth ivory from Alaska, I’ve heard. Scrimshaw of that era sometimes had that origin.
;^)
How far out to sea might a bloated body float before sinking?
And are found in the shallow Gulf waters off of the West coast of Florida.
Robert Redford again. I’d not seen that movie - lots to take in
Depends on whether it was dry land at the time. Glaciation came and went multiple times, and there have been a number of different “normal” sealevels as a consequence of that (sometimes more ice, sometimes less). Fossil shorelines can still be discerned here and there, some of which are due to those different sealevels.
It was a mammoth undertaking to recover it.
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