Texas family to part ways with skeleton of mammoth found on its farm

A North Texas family, who discovered the skeleton of a 20,000- to 40,000-year-old mammoth while mining through sediment on their farm, is preparing to turn over the remains to a local museum. In May, Wayne McEwen and his family were gathering material from a gravel pit on their property, south of Dallas, when his son struck a 6-foot (1.8 meter) tusk while operating an excavator.

Join Our Community of Science Lovers!

By Lisa Maria Garza

DALLAS (Reuters) - A North Texas family, who discovered the skeleton of a 20,000- to 40,000-year-old mammoth while mining through sediment on their farm, is preparing to turn over the remains to a local museum.

In May, Wayne McEwen and his family were gathering material from a gravel pit on their property, south of Dallas, when his son struck a 6-foot (1.8 meter) tusk while operating an excavator.

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

The rest of the near-complete skeleton was unearthed by a team from a nearby community college, who determined it was a Columbian mammoth - a slightly larger, less hairy version of the more famous woolly mammoth.

The family decided to donate the remains to the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas.

Ron Tykoski, a paleontologist with the museum who is working with a team to prepare the specimen for transport, said the remains are missing a few leg bones but are mostly intact.

"We get a lot of mammoth fossils in Texas but it's usually a tooth here, a tusk there or a piece of jaw," Tykoski said on Tuesday.

"This is unusual. It looks like it just laid down and died."

There is no sign the carcass was disturbed by scavengers, likely because flood waters covered it with silt shortly after its death, he said.

The mammoth is believed to be a female because of its small size, the length of the tusks and the flare of the pelvic bones.

The animal was approximately 8-9 feet (2.4-2.7 meters) tall at the shoulder, or similar in size to a modern-day female Asian elephant.

"It needed to stay in North Texas where the local communities can enjoy it for a long time to come," McEwen said in a news release.

(Reporting by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Sandra Maler)

Subscribe to Support Independent Journalism

Great science journalism requires human expertise, time, effort and creativity. And it costs money. That’s why I and the journalists here at Scientific American hope you’ll join our community.

When you subscribe, you are supporting staff and freelance journalists who are passionate about telling science stories that are true, important and compelling. Our editors and reporters are often experts in their fields, which means they understand the nuances of big discoveries and can untangle the breakthroughs from the hype. With a subscription, you are also supporting rigorous fact-checking to ensure the words we publish are precise and accurate. And you’re supporting original illustrations, graphics and photos that bring you closer to an advanced laboratory, an ice sheet in Antarctica or a space mission in orbit. You’re helping us craft other types of high-quality journalism as well: Our newsletters are carefully written, edited and curated by staffers you have or will come to know and love. Our Science Quickly podcast is based on original reporting, collaboration with editors and scientists and exacting production.

Subscriptions keep this engine running so we can continue to deliver thoughtful, rigorous and independent science journalism to you. In an era of viral misinformation, this work is crucial. If you value what we do, I hope you’ll consider joining us as a subscriber

Thank you,

Jeanna Bryner, Editor in Chief, Scientific American