1/2 Million Year Old Mammoth Recovered

It's always amusing to me when geological, archaeological, or in this case, paleontological stories hit the mainstream national media with excitement. Perhaps I'm a snob, but please, if you don't know what you are talking about, SHUT UP. You don't care about any other imporant finds around the world, so why should you care about this one?? The people on the Today show this morning talking about it obviously have no idea what this find means and I would venture to make the judgement they don't know anything about Mammoths. At least they made an effort, I suppose.

Mammoth remains unearthed at California construction site

This is a cool find because it is so old and yet so much of it is still there--this is due to rapid deposition--once this Mammoth got stuck in the mud, it was covered by other mud, thus he preserved. You can't use C-14 techniques to date bones this old, so paleontologists can only make educated guesses as to the date. They used the location of the bones in the ground with relation to the bedrock.

Mammoth finds are rare here in Ohio, though bone fragments and teeth have been recovered. The American Mastodon was much more prominant in Ohio during the Pleistocene, the ice age which began 16,000 years ago, much earlier than the find in California. One of my positions in my interdisiplinary life is to talk to students and guests about the Mastodon on display at the Ohio Historical Society. He is known as the Conway Mastodon, found on the Conway farm in Clark County, Ohio, west of Columbus. He is one of the most complete Mastodon's ever recovered.