A pair of Midwest farmers recently discovered a prehistoric beast hidden in blue clay.
Jim Bristle and Trent Satterthwaite dropped a bucket below mature beans, and when they felt it shift, they know they had hit something. They found a woolly mammoth skeleton next to three large boulders.
“A mammoth in my soybeans is the find of our lifetimes, but even now, when I’m driving or walking across the field, I can’t help but wonder: What else is down there?” Bristle tells AgWeb.
Usually, farmers will find junk of sorts in their farmland, but they say they are “the two most unlikely guys to stumble over something considered sensational.”
According to a professor, the mammoth was scavenged by Native Americans somewhere around 15,500 years ago.
“The best evidence is he died during mating season, either in late spring or early summer. It’s possible he got into a fight with another male because there’s evidence of damage to his skull that looks to have been inflicted by the tusk of another animal in a slamming action. People on the landscape would have heard the fighting. They came along afterward, got supper, and then stored the meat,” said Dan Fisher, curator of the UM Museum of Paleontology.
After the bones were found, Jim Bristle changed the farm location name from Generation Acres to Mammoth Acres.
Story via Chris Bennett with AgWeb
