A 10-inch tooth, a vertebrae and a whole collection of ribs were found right after the other in rural Mahaska County over the weekend.
“I remember digging in one area, hearing someone yell, ‘This is a tooth!’ and they were very excited,” said Laura DeCook of the Mahaska County Conservation Board.
Three mammoths – two adults and one juvenile – that are likely 14,000 to 16,000 years old have already been found.
“We might be working on a hip bone tomorrow because there’s a big bone jutting out,” DeCook said.
For security reasons, the location of the dig is not being disclosed, but it is on private property in the county.
They’ve been digging since last August, DeCook said.
“You hear about all these mammoths they find under the ice in Siberia, and well this is here in our own backyard,” DeCook said.
The wooly mammoths provide information about what the Earth was like in Iowa 16,000 years ago. The climate back then was more like what you would find in southern Canada now, DeCook said. And the area was filled with fur and spruce trees.
“Scientists are fascinated by how there's a lot underground that's telling a story,” DeCook said. “Why they died there we aren't completely sure, perhaps there was a plunge pool, a deep pool of water under a waterfall.”
And it was water, specifically flooding in 2010, that brought them back up.
“Something had stirred up the bones and carried them to this area,” DeCook said. “We don’t know how long we’re going to be digging. It kind of depends on how long the landowner wants us there. Pretty much until we stop finding bones as we dig into the hillside here.”
Anything that is unearthed belongs to the anonymous landowner. Right now, he is allowing quite a few conservationists onto his land to help with the dig.
He wants the remains to be used for educational purposes in Mahaska County instead of trying to profit from them.