The terrain of Texas never ceases to reveal hidden treasures of the past. In fact, just this last December, a West Texas hunter’s day out turned prehistoric when he noticed something peculiar in a dry creek bed.
Thinking it might be a fossil, photos of his find made their way to researchers at Sul Ross State University. Weeks later, it was confirmed. The fossil was indeed an ancient mammoth tusk – a very rare find.
Bryon Schroeder, archeologist and director of the Center for Big Bend Studies at Sul Ross, joined the Standard with the story. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Before we get to the details, tell us about the moment this fossil was confirmed to be from a mammoth. What was your reaction?
Bryon Schroeder: I’d got a text message and the text message showed what they thought could be a stump or a tusk. They’re ivory and it was in a creek bed and it was pretty obvious that it was a tusk of ivory.
They said do I need to come out and confirm it and I was like “I can tell you right now.”
How did you know? What was the tell? What was the giveaway?
I mean they’re bright white and I was like “if that’s a stump, it’s the weirdest stump I’ve ever seen.”
Have you seen these in the wild before? I mean surely you must have.
I’ve seen one tusk and it’s also been out here in Texas and it was just a little itty-bitty piece of one, but this was the whole thing laying in the bottom of a drain.
How could this be overlooked for so long? It must be just that remote.
I think it’s that remote and there’s not that many people out there. I think these hunters had a little serendipity involved. These guys were out, you know, the right place at the right time.
It could have also just been dislodged rather recently because, I mean, it was in the creek drainage. So it could have just been exposed that quickly.
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Well tell us more about this area that it was found in. It was on a ranch that borders Brewster and Presidio counties out in the Big Bend region, right?
Yeah. So we’ve actually been doing a lot of work out there for a long time. And we’ve kind of told the ranch manager that if they ever see anything like this…
Because we’re super interested in that time period, that place, the same time period where mammoths are roaming around and people could be interacting with them. And we actually spent a good amount of the summer trying to find something like that through much slower means.
And a hunter went out there and tripped across it just…
Time to take up a new hobby, it sounds like, professor. But let’s clarify what period we’re talking about. Did you say Pleistocene? Is that right?
Yeah. So the Pleistocene spans 2.5 million to the last 13,000 years. And, you know, people weren’t here during that entire time frame, but the last 13,000 years is when people are out here and we just don’t know how many folks of that early period are out here.
And to find them, you got to find mammoths because they’re way more visible than little stone tools. So that’s why we’re super interested in it.
And it was it was it known that prior to this discovery mammoths lived in this region or what?
Yeah, so Harvard, with Sul Ross, did a very early, very large study out here in the late 1920s, early ’30s. And they knew about a lot of mammoths, and we’ve been actually trying to find those mammoth localities. And we just haven’t had a ton of luck.
And so people knew about them, but nobody’s ever dated them. Nobody’s ever really found one and figured out, you know, which part of the Pleistocene we’re talking about. Because at some point, mammoths get over here before people do.
You know, are these too early? Are these the right age for being associated with humans? And we’ve just not done that work because we just haven’t been able to find those localities.
How rare is this discovery? I mean, when was the last time a discovery like this was made out in your neck of the woods?
Uh, I’m sure there’s probably some ranchers out here that probably know where a lot of mammoths are on their land.
They just haven’t rang you up yet.
Yeah, haven’t rang me up. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years and I’ve seen one. I’ve seen this one. So they’re fairly rare.
Amazing. So what now happens and what’s the potential impact of this discovery from what you can tell?
So we’re going to date it and some folks have been working up in Alaska in some of the more northern areas where these are a little bit more common. We’ve figured out you can figure out the life history of these guys. So we’re interested in like reconstructing where this guy was in his life and some environmental reconstructions.
We’re partnering with the University of Kansas and there’s a PhD student that’s going to try to find some more of this. So it’s the beginning of actually a really concentrated look on this and seeing if we can find more of them and a longer detailed study of how many are out here and if humans were hunting them.
You plan on excavating that particular area, or what do you think?
That one, actually, we did a really good concerted effort looking around that area and we didn’t find much more of that one. We think it’s washed out.
But no, we’re going to walk that whole drainage and see if we can find where this tusk came from, because it’s got to be close to where it ended up because it’s huge. It’s six feet long.
Gee whiz, that’s amazing. That is just amazing. By the way, what happens to the tusk eventually? Will it be sent to a museum or go into a research cabinet somewhere or what?
No, we’re going to try not to hermetically seal it. We’ll take some samples and then we actually are going to give it back to the ranch. It’s theirs and they’re really good stewards of it. Hunters came forward and I think it should be something that they enjoy and get to see and we’ll document it and do everything that we can with it and let them continue to enjoy it.
I mean, they’re really the heroes here. They called us and got us out there. Without them, we couldn’t do it.
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