Mysterious tusk recovered off California coast is from a mammoth, researchers say

Researchers dove 10,000 feet into the ocean two years ago and found a tiny piece of history that belonged to an ancient creature.

Randy Prickett, the pilot of a remotely operated vehicle, and scientist Steven Haddock discovered something that “looked like an elephant’s tusk” about 185 miles from the California coast in 2019.

At the time, they were only able to collect a small portion of the tusk. Two years later, this past July, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute returned to recover the whole thing.

The 3-foot-long tusk came from a Columbian mammoth, a furry creature that walked the North American continent more than a million years ago.

“You start to ‘expect the unexpected’ when exploring the deep sea, but I’m still stunned that we came upon the ancient tusk of a mammoth,” Haddock said in a Nov. 22 news release.

The cold, high-pressure environment at the bottom of the ocean likely helped preserve the tusk for thousands of years, researchers said.

A team of researchers at the University of Santa Cruz’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences will now investigate how the tusk got into the ocean and determine how old it is.

They believe it could be more than 100,000 years old, making it the oldest “well-preserved mammoth tusk recovered from this region.”

Scientists said it’s rare that a mammoth part is found so deep in water.

“This specimen’s deep-sea preservational environment is different from almost anything we have seen elsewhere,” University of Michigan paleontologist Daniel Fisher said in the news release. “Other mammoths have been retrieved from the ocean, but generally not from depths of more than a few tens of meters.”

This story was originally published November 23, 2021 at 2:03 PM with the headline "Mysterious tusk recovered off California coast is from a mammoth, researchers say."