[Rockhounds] Spotted in a Mississippi creek: The state’s first mammoth tusk

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

Eddie Templeton traces his love of fossil-hunting to walks along a local
creek as a boy in central Mississippi, trawling for bits of fossilized tree
bark and shark teeth on trips with his father and sister.

None of that prepared Templeton, now 68, for his latest find: a 7-foot-long
tusk from a Columbian mammoth that lived tens of thousands of years ago
during the last Ice Age.

The lifelong Madison, Miss., resident was deep in river water on Aug. 3
when he saw something big sticking out of the mud in the distance. He
quickly realized it was something unusual.

“I took photographs of what I could see and texted them to scientists that
worked for the state and got an immediate call back from one of them,”
Templeton said.

It’s the first recorded mammoth fossil of its kind discovered in the state
— and it was entirely intact. That fact “makes it an extremely rare find
for Mississippi,” the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality wrote
in a blog post
<https://www.mdeq.ms.gov/geology/fossil-friday/?fbclid=IwY2xjawEoy3FleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHY_fi1HHgvA58hzMdigZTQO0G1WxYCsd85NsYG7fYXk-H_ROu1L43zqIyA_aem_D2CMyxw0Y3Q56oU_NXk7uw>
.

“I get excited over the smaller stuff, so this is huge,” Templeton, who
previously has found fossils of giant Ice Age sloths, beaver and
armadillos, told The Washington Post. “Most people don’t realize these
fossils are out there.”


https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/08/14/mississippi-mammoth-tusk/