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Woolly mammoth teeth found at Iowa construction site

Justin Blauwet noticed something unusual while working on a construction site in Iowa. At first glance, it appears to be a block of rock, less than a meter long, covered with ridges.

But Blauwet has a better understanding of what it is, thanks to a lifelong interest in prehistoric animals: a woolly mammoth tooth can date back tens of thousands of years.

Blauwet was observing a construction site March 4 on land owned by Northwest Iowa Community College in Sheldon when he discovered the tooth, according to a news release Wednesday from his employer. , DGR Engineering.

He said he recognized the tooth thanks to his deep knowledge of fossils and prehistoric creatures. “I’m such a ‘nerd’,” he told DGR, adding that his two young sons are also passionate about fossils and dinosaurs.

The company asked Tiffany Adrain, an associate professor of paleontology at the University of Iowa, to examine the find. She claimed it was real wool; y is the tooth of the mammoth.

The tooth is 11 inches long and weighs 11.2 pounds. Adrain said it could be more than 20,000 years old.

“Mammoths have really special teeth,” Chris Widga, Executive Director at East Tennessee State University, told CNN Saturday. Almost like a loaf of bread, their unique shape makes the mammoth’s teeth very recognizable in fact.

“They evolved to take advantage of a grazing niche, eating a lot of abrasive plants like grass,” he said. According to Widga, this particular specimen could be a mammoth in its 30s, based on the amount of wear on the teeth. “This is going to be an adult at the peak of his life,” he said.

Experts believe that woolly mammoths went extinct around 4,000 years ago. Ice Age giants could have grown up to 13 feet tall and roamed the planet for hundreds of thousands of years: World’s oldest DNA strand recovered from a mammoth tooth more than a million years old .

It is more common to discover individual mammoth teeth than bones or complete skeletons, says Widga, because they are made of enamel, which is thicker and “stronger than the broken ones.” skeleton”.

Over time, a tooth can wear away from the original area in which it was deposited and find itself in a new deposit, away from the rest. Their distinctive appearance also makes them more likely to be noticed than other fossils.

And Northwest Iowa is “a hotspot” for mammoth finds, Widga noted, with discoveries tending to be between 24,000 and 15,000 years old.

In general, mammoth remains tend to be found in one of two geological settings: gravel deposits and swampy, clayey deposits. Widga explains: “One of the interesting things about Iowa is that, given its geological history, it had a lot of animals in the Pleistocene, which is really interesting.

About 18,000 years ago, the central part of Iowa was covered with ice. But the edges of the state were exposed – and these areas tended to turn into mammoth remains.

In 2013, the remains of three mammoths were discovered after floods washed away the bones, according to CNN affiliate KCCI. The skeletons are estimated to be between 14,000 and 16,000 years old. According to Widga, sites with lots of animals are pretty rare.

Blauwet’s discovery is expected to soon have a new home at the Sheldon Prairie Museum of Northwest Iowa Community College. Sheldon is located about 60 miles northeast of the city of Sioux.

“We are delighted to have the tooth on display in the Sheldon Prairie Museum as a semi-permanent loan,” the university’s president, Dr John Hartog, said, according to the DGR news release. “This way, everyone from across our business area can come to the museum to see and appreciate this artifact.”

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