Miners Find Mammoth Remains Buried in North Dakota
2024-01-13
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1The first person who saw it was working overnight.
2The worker, a shovel operator, saw something white as he placed a large amount of dirt into the back of a truck.
3The driver of the truck put the dirt in the road.
4Another worker operating a bulldozer was ready to flatten it.
5But the worker stopped for a closer look when he, too, saw a piece of white.
6Only then did the mining workers realize they had found something special: a 2-meter-long mammoth tusk that had been buried for thousands of years.
7A mammoth is a kind of animal that lived in ancient times and had very long tusks.
8The animal went extinct, or disappeared, about 10,000 years ago in what is now the American state of North Dakota.
9The miners unearthed the tusk at the Freedom Mine near Beulah, North Dakota.
10The mine produces up to 14.5 metric tons of coal each year.
11"We were very fortunate, lucky to find what we found," said David Straley.
12He is an executive of North American Coal, which owns the mine.
13After finding the tusk, the workers stopped digging in the area and called in experts.
14The experts estimated the tusk to be anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 years old.
15Jeff Person is a paleontologist with the North Dakota Geologic Survey.
16A paleontologist is an expert on ancient remains.
17Person was one of the experts that examined the tusk.
18He said it was "miraculous" that the tusk had not been more damaged, considering the large equipment that miners use at the site.
19Another dig at the discovery site found more bones.
20Experts found more than 20 bones.
21It is likely the most complete mammoth found in North Dakota, where it is more common to find one mammoth bone, tooth or piece of a tusk.
22Person said it is not a lot of bones compared to how many make up the animal's skeleton.
23But he said, "...it's a lot more than we've ever found of one animal together."
24Mammoths once were found across parts of Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America.
25Paul Ullmann, a University of North Dakota paleontologist, said mammoth remains have been found throughout the United States and Canada.
26The discovery at the mine is somewhat rare in North Dakota and in the area.
27Many remains of the animals alive during the last Ice Age were destroyed by movements of ice sheets, Ullmann said.
28Other areas have produced more mammoth remains, such as in Texas and South Dakota.
29People have even found frozen mammoth bodies in Canada and Russia, Ullmann added.
30The tusk weighs more than 22.6 kilograms and can break easily.
31Experts covered the tusk in plastic in order to control how fast the tusk loses water.
32If it loses water too quickly, the bone could break apart, Person said.
33The experts covered the other bones in plastic and stored them.
34The bones will remain in plastic for at least several months until the scientists can get the water out safely.
35The paleontologists will identify what kind of mammoth the tusk came from later, Person said.
36The mining company plans to donate the bones to the state for educational purposes.
37"Our goal is to give it to the kids," Straley said.
38I'm Gregory Stachel.