ALPINE, Texas — It’s not every day you find a prehistoric fossil anywhere, let alone in Texas.
This is exactly what happened to a deer hunter visiting the O2 Ranch, a privately owned ranch in Brewster and Presidio counties. The ranch’s manager, Will Juett, said the hunter showed him a picture of what he thought was a fossil he had found.
“I figured it was likely just an old stump, but imagined how great it would be if he was right,” Juett said via a press release from the Center for Big Bend Studies (CBBS).
Juett and the CBBS at Sul Ross State University in Alpine have a great working relationship, so Juett reached out to CBBS Director Dr. Bryon Schroeder and CBBS Archaeologist Erika Blecha about what the hunter found. Schroeder and Blecha got a team together, which included University of Kansas graduate student Haley Bjorklund, and anthropology professors Dr. Justin Garnett and Dr. Devin Pettigrew, to head out to the property and explore the discovery further.
Schroeder said the researchers quickly verified that it was a mammoth tusk, a very rare find in West Texas.
“The tusk was located in the drainage area of a creek bed,” Schroeder said. “We realized pretty quickly there was not more to the skeleton, it was just an isolated tusk that had been separated from the rest of the remains.”
The team spent two days plaster-jacketing the tusk — covering it in strips of plaster-covered burlap for protection — and building a frame to transfer it to Sul Ross State University for further study, CCBS said in a release.
“A local [who subsequently wrote his PhD dissertation on it] found one in Fort Stockton in the 1960s,” Schroeder said, noting that it’s the only mammoth tusk in the Trans-Pecos that was carbon dated, as that process began in the 1950s. “There was a big range of error back then. Now we can get it down to a narrower range within 500 years.”
According to CBBS, carbon dating results on this tusk will be available in the next few months.
For Juett, though, the discovery created quite the buzz on the ranch.
“Now, I can’t help but imagine that huge animal wandering around the hills on the O2 Ranch,” Juett said. “My next thought is always about the people that faced those huge tusks with only a stone tool in their hand!”
To learn more about the Center for Big Bend Studies, click here.