For those of you who heard about the fossil excavated from thirty feet down by DBM Contractors, the drilling sub-contractor for the new Exit 14 Interstate 5 exchange, here is a link to the Columbian article:
It sounds crazy, but in February of 2010 Inspector Brad Clark noticed debris in the dirt and decided that it didn't really look like wood. He halted the work and picked out the pieces putting them together like a jigsaw puzzle. The inspector described the smell as 'indescribable', because he probably is much more polite than you or I would be, but 15,000 year old decaying matter might be a bit rich.
Clark is a WSDOT inspector, and so he contacted the environmental department and Roger Kiers, an archaelogist, drove down from Olympia. It appears that Clark was correct and the tusk is believed to be from a Columbian Mammoth, the Washington State fossil.:) These mammoths roamed this area up until about 10,000 years ago, but this particular tusk is estimated to be older.
Speculation about how the animal ended up embedded in claysoils and sediment are many, but it is fun for everyone to imagine what it would have been like to see one of these creatures lumbering past one's "plankhouse". Below is an artist's rendering of the animals from the La Brea Tarpits museum. It is interesting to note that geneticists have unscrambled about four-fifths of its genome making these sorts of discoveries all the more interesting. Courtesy of Flickr photo: Travis S.
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