A Mississippi man recently made headlines after finding a tusk from a mammoth in a Madison County creek. The complete tusk was estimated to be 10,000-20,000 years old and was a first-of-its-kind discovery in Mississippi.
But the story didn't end there. A plaster jacket was formed around the tusk to protect it and while it was drying, the man came across a fossilized bone from a giant whale that swam the seas millions of years ago.
"That was pretty wild," said Eddie Templeton of Madison. "It was the same day. It wasn't as exciting of a find as the mammoth tusk by any stretch of the imagination, but it was interesting that in the same place on the same day, I ran across these two fossils."
Templeton describes himself as an avocational archaeologist and fossil collector and was recently walking along a creek in Madison County looking for fossils when he came across a mammoth tusk. The tusk Templeton found came from a Columbian mammoth that lived between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago, not the more famous, but smaller woolly mammoth.
Columbian mammoths could grow up to 15 feet tall at the shoulder and weigh in excess of 10 tons. Woolly mammoths were about 9-10 feet tall at the shoulder as were mastodons according to the National Park Service.
'It was huge.': Mississippi man finds rare mammoth tusk, first in the state
It was a huge find from a huge animal, but Templeton was about to find a vertebra from something bigger -- much bigger.
Temple contacted James Starnes with the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality's Office of Geology. Starnes, along with coworker Jonathan Leard, went to the site to excavate the find. As a part of the process, a plaster jacket was formed over the tusk to provide support and protection. While it dried, the three decided to see if they could find anything that would tell them more about the history of the tusk.
"We walked further down the creek," Templeton said. "There were some gravel bars and we were looking at them. There was a deep pool with a log running across it."
That's where Templeton saw a fossilized vertebra from an ancient whale known as Basilosaurus.
"I've seen some before, so I knew what it was," Templeton said.
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If you've been to the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, you've likely seen the skeletal reproduction of a Basilosaurus hanging in the atrium. However, as big as it is, they may have been larger.
"The mounted specimen downstairs is 62-feet long, but there are estimates they got up to 72-to-75-feet long," said George Phillips, paleontologist at the museum. "This would have been the largest vertebrate animal in the ocean."
At that size it could eat about anything it wanted, and the predator had large teeth designed to do the job.
"All of the teeth were designed for cutting," Phillips said.
And the predator roamed the seas for millions of years.
"It first appeared 39 million years ago and became extinct around 34 million years ago," Phillips said.
Obviously, mammoths lived on land and Basilosaurs lived in oceans. So, how could remains of the two be found in the same area?
"They are directly related even though they're millions of years apart," Starnes said.
Starnes explained that during the time of Basilosaurus, temperatures were high and so was sea level.
"Going back to the dinosaurs, the world was in a greenhouse environment," Starnes said. "There was no ice on the poles at this time.
"Sea levels worldwide were high. Central Mississippi would have been about 1,000 feet under water."
However, mammoths were on the landscape during an ice age with much of the water frozen on land, so sea levels were much lower.
"It literally is the opposite ends of the spectrum," Starnes said.
So, that left remains of animals from completely different environments and millions of years apart in the same location.
"This is pretty cool to have fossils in the same creek from such a span of time," Templeton said.
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