7-foot-long mammoth tusk found in Mississippi creek in rare discovery

Eddie Templeton was wading through a rural Mississippi creek on one of his regular hunts for fossils when he made a mammoth discovery.

The avid fossil collector saw a tusk sticking out of the bank of the creek in Madison County. He knew it was likely from the last ice age, though soon learned he had found a fully intact tusk that once belonged to a Columbian mammoth.

"Probably two-thirds of it was showing. I thought, Wow, this is a lot of tusk," Templeton told ABC News.

As he dug it out, Templeton realized the entire 7-foot-long tusk was still intact, "which was unusual."

The discovery of the intact mammoth tusk marks an "extremely rare find for Mississippi," according to the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ).

"Most fossil tusk ivory found around the state are just fragments and most are likely to be attributable to the more common mastodon," MDEQ said in a statement on Friday.

The massive Columbian mammoth, a proboscidean related to modern elephants that lived during the Pleistocene Epoch, could grow to be 15 feet at the shoulder and weigh over 10 tons. The discovery of the tusk is the first of its kind for the area, according to MDEQ, which said that mammoths are "far less common finds in Mississippi as they were open grassland grazers and would have been at home in only a select few environments, particularly the prairie regions of Mississippi."

Templeton said he was initially disappointed by the conditions of the creek, due to the high water at the time. He had only been out for about 30 minutes on the morning of Aug. 3 when he found the tusk while searching the bank for fossils.

He sent a photo of the tusk to geologists who work for the state and George Phillips, the paleontology curator for the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science in Jackson. Based on the curvature of the tusk, the tusk was suspected to be from a Columbian mammoth, and not the more common mastodon, MDEQ said.

"This thing makes almost a full circle, the curvature of it," Templeton said. "I've never found an entire mastodon tusk, but I found some pretty big pieces, and they're clearly not curved like that."

The massive fossil needed to be removed as soon as possible, otherwise the heat could dry it out and the tusk could fracture.

"There was kind of a sense of urgency to get it out, because once it starts drying, this process of delamination starts, and it can go downhill pretty quick," Templeton said. "From the beginning, our intention was to try to get it protected, out of the creek and to a better environment to protect it."

Templeton knew it was too big for him to excavate by himself and he was soon joined by MDEQ's Mississippi State Geological Survey paleontological team. They spent the rest of the day working to extract the fossil from the embankment.

Once it was photographed in situ, the fossil was covered in a protective plaster jacket to stabilize it during its removal, MDEQ said. The fossil -- which weighed about 600 pounds in the plaster jacket -- was then lifted onto a makeshift gurney made out of an ATV ramp, according to MDEQ. It was then brought up a steep bluff onto a truck and transported to the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science for preservation and study.

"Eddie's discovery offers a rare window into the Columbian mammoths that once roamed Madison County along the Jackson Prairie of central Mississippi," MDEQ said.

The tusk belonged to an adult mammoth that would have lived toward the end of the Pleistocene Epoch and could be as much 75,000 years old but as young as 11,500, Phillips told ABC News. It was confirmed to be a mammoth tusk due to the "extreme curvature, nearly a complete circle," that is characteristic of the proboscidean, he said.

The fossil is currently drying under optimal conditions. After a couple of months, it will be treated with a compound "that is very similar to that used in laminating safety glass in the windshields of cars and trucks," Phillips said.

Once it is cleaned and preserved, the museum hopes to get a better estimate of the age of the mammoth when it died by counting the rings where the tusk is broken in the middle, he said.

The museum also hopes to have the fossil on view, with at least a temporary display possibly as early as March 2025, Phillips said.

Templeton has searched for fossils for decades, including among his ice age findings giant beaver and saber-toothed cat bones. He ranks the mammoth tusk among his top two most impressive finds -- the other being the entire mandible of a mastodon, "with teeth in it and everything." He found that in 1996 and donated it to the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science.

"It's fascinating to me," he said. "It's hard for anybody not to have some interest in that stuff once they start seeing it."

He said he's glad the discovery is drawing attention to Mississippi's scientists, the museum and the region's rich geological history.

"Most people don't know the stuff's even out there," he said.

The mammoth is believed to have died near where the tusk was found, with its remains then carried along the stream channel, according to MDEQ. The tusk was covered with alluvium, possibly during a major flooding event, MDEQ said. Phillips told ABC Jackson affiliate WAPT that the tusk would have likely been buried "relatively immediately" to have been preserved so well.

Templeton, who said he goes out searching for fossils every few weeks, thinks he'll go back to the creek where he found the tusk next weekend for his next fossil hunt.

"Now I want to find a mammoth tooth," he said. "Now that I know that a mammoth died right here, I'm optimistic that I'll find a mammoth tooth."