Originally published at: Ancient mammoth tusk found on the deep ocean floor | Boing Boing
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I hope it makes its way back to the original owner.
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“Haddock”? great blue blistering barnacles!
So how did a mammoth tusk get so far out into the ocean?
- Well, there was sea ice that far out back then and it just walked
- Died on a glacier which became an iceberg which eventually melted
- Pieces in a sunk canoe from humans arriving a helluva lot earlier than people think
- Mammoths can swim? once they got the bathing cap worked out
- There were really big birds of prey back then
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Could have died and been washed out to sea as well. Fascinating stuff.
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TUSK!
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It’s probably also worth thinking about what aquatic mega fauna would have been around at the time, too. I’m picturing a cheetah at a watering hole with a croc kind of scenario, only… larger.
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Can’t see any reason a Mammoth couldn’t have gone for a swim off the California coastline as long as they weren’t one of those pachyderms who get self-conscious about showing body hair on the beach.
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Remains of a dwarf mammoth subspecies are well documented on some California islands and, similarly, dwarf elephants have been found on islands in the Mediterranean (Malta?). I think the remains in California are from a later era, like 50,000 years ago, but it indicates they may have swum there.
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Or even gone for a swim closer to the coast and been swept out to sea in a rip tide or something. I imagine a mammoth corpse could float/drift quite some distance.
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the mammoth fell off Noah’s ark, duh!
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Sea level was a lot lower then. Mammoth remains are regularly trawled up from the bed of the North Sea by fishing boats. It was dry land back then
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I always thought to coolest superpower would be to be able to touch an object and know its whole story.
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Dogger Bank, the remains of Doggerland, that used to lie between the British Isles and Scandinavia, is a source of mammoth bones, and other pre-historic finds dredged up by fishing nets.
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A population of Columbian mammoths that lived between 80,000 and 13,000 years ago on the Channel Islands of California, 10 km (6.2 mi) away from the mainland, evolved to be less than half the size of the mainland Columbian mammoths.[10] They are, therefore, considered to be the distinct species M. exilis , the pygmy mammoth (or a subspecies, M. c. exilis ). These mammoths presumably reached the islands by swimming there when sea levels were lower, and decreased in size due to the limited food provided by the islands’ small areas. Bones of larger specimens have also been found on the islands, but whether these were stages in the dwarfing process, or later arrivals of Columbian mammoths is unknown.[7][11][12]
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Yay for stories like this, wonderful things on the internets! And yay for MBARI, they do great work! One clip in that video was outside the Seymour Marine Discovery Center. Can’t miss that whale skeleton right out front!
https://seymourcenter.ucsc.edu/
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noah, you had one job!
or even a mammoth which died and was preserved near the coast, then erosion and the ocean took hold…
do bones float?
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Side note: Deep sea mining is a silent disaster in the making. There are only a handful of people in the world with the capital and resources to observe it. This makes it a prime target for abuse by resource extraction companies who operate in an effectively ungovernable landscape.
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Scuba diving incident
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Talk about nominative determinism!
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