On Tuesday, February 11, 2014, an employee of Transit Plumbing, Inc. discovered a Columbian mammoth tusk at a South Lake Union construction site in Seattle. I had heard about its discovery that day but hadn’t given it much thought beyond “you never know when or where fossil discoveries are going to turn up.”
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| The Columbian mammoth is Washington's state fossil and had tusks up to 15 feet long. These mammoths ranged across North America until the last glacial retreat about 11,000 years ago. Image by Charles Knight, 1922, public domain. |
The following Thursday around 8:30 a.m., I received a text message from Dr. Christian Sidor, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Burke Museum and University of Washington Associate Professor of Biology, asking if I’d like to help excavate the mammoth tusk. “Sure!” I immediately responded, thinking what an adventure it would be to dig up an ice age animal in the middle of a city.
