Mississippi man strikes gold with discovery of mammoth tusk

Most fossil hunters can only dream of such a find, so Eddie Templeton can count himself lucky. The man, while wading in a stream in Mississippi, stumbled upon a mammoth tusk over 7 feet long.

Eddie Templeton is an avid collector of artifacts and fossils. Exploring the rural areas of Madison County, he came across what appeared to be an exposed fragment of an Ice Age elephant tusk.

He immediately contacted the paleontological team at the State Survey. The Mississippi Museum of Natural Science also provided the necessary materials to excavate and stabilize the find properly.

The discoverer and the paleontological team worked all day manually removing the clayey sand from the find, allowing them to extract a tusk over 7 feet long from the mud intact.

To our surprise, it had been deposited entirely intact. This makes it an extremely rare find for Mississippi - emphasized experts from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality.

According to George Phillips from the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, it is a Columbian mammoth tusk related to the woolly mammoth. These animals lived in the late Pleistocene epoch, so their fossils can be between 11,700 and 75,000 years old.

Columbian mammoths were much more significant than woolly mammoths, which roamed North America's cooler, more northern regions. These mammals played a crucial role in maintaining the rich, fertile prairie ecosystem, similar to their modern relatives, elephants, in other parts of the world.

Eddie Templeton's find is the first in the entire region. The Columbian mammoth probably weighed over 22,000 pounds and could grow up to 13 feet tall. The exhibit has been sent to the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science.