Divers discover Ice Age mammoth thigh bone in Florida river
Image: Derek Demeter / Henry Sadler
Divers in Florida made a monster find on Sunday (May 2): A 4-foot (1.2 meters) mammoth leg bone. The divers, Derek Demeter and Henry Sadler, found the 50-pound (22.7 kilograms) bone in the Peace River near Acadia, Florida.
“Henry is my dive buddy,” Demeter, who is the planetarium director at Seminole State University, told Fox 35. “He yelled out to me, said, ‘Hey, Derek. I found something!’ Oh my goodness!’ It was really, really cool.”
The two friends dive regularly in southwest Florida, and they have previously found mammoth teeth in the river. The same day they discovered the leg bone, they also found several small fossils from extinct sharks and the tooth of a saber-tooth cat, they told the news station. The new mammoth bone was buried in a layer of sand. Its age is unclear, but Columbian mammoths (Mammuthus columbi) roamed as far south as Costa Rica during the last Ice Age.
In 2011, scientists confirmed that fossils found on Vero Beach in southeast Florida were mammoth bones from about 13,000 years ago. The Columbian mammoth was probably a hybrid between the woolly mammoth and an unknown lineage of mammoth that arrived in North America from Siberia around 1.5 million years ago, according to recent DNA research.
The new bone is a mammoth femur, or thigh bone. The animal it belonged to could have grown up to 14 feet (2.25 m) tall and could have weighed up to 22,000 pounds (10,000 kg).
The amateur archaeologists have donated several finds to the Florida Museum of Natural History. Sadler is keeping the bone in the middle-school classroom where he teaches in order to engage kids in the ancient history of Florida.
“It’s currently sitting in the classroom where the kids are able to see it, touch it, feel it and really get a history of the natural world,” he said.
See more here: livescience.com
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JaKo
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Well, and who supposed that Mammoth weren’t smart enough to escape the cold of the north? That is, at least for the winters?! I bet that bone was from a senior Canadian Mammoth!!
I hope that “the scientists” will allow to continue this tradition soon…
Cheers, JaKo
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Jerry Krause
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Hi JaKo,
Have you studied ‘HUMAN NATURE’??? Where you live in Canada is not where you were born. And the winters in Canada are evidently much colder than the winters where you were born and lived the early part of your life.
While I have no personal experience to support my following statement. ‘I do not see the ‘natives’ who were born inside the Arctic Polar Circle rushing to retire in Florida. I do have personal experience with the ‘European natives’ who were born in Hibbing, MN which has some of the coldest winters of lower 48 US states. Many do winter in the souther state soon after they retire, but eventually most all of these, after a few years of doing this, stop doing this and come back to live full-time in Hibbing’s very cold winters. HUMAN NATURE???
But another observed fact is that most of those who migrated to the USA from Europe, seldom even visit Europe. And if they do go back to Europe it is only as a tourist who wants to see what other people have done and are doing now.
Other animals, than humans, do migrate yearly great distances because they obviously have been programed to do this without thinking.
Have a good day, Jerry
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