The lifelong Madison, Miss., resident was deep in river water on Aug. 3 when he saw something big sticking out of the mud in the distance. He quickly realized it was something unusual.

Spotted in a Mississippi creek: The state’s first mammoth tusk

The state’s Department of Environmental Quality called it “an extremely rare find for Mississippi.”

Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality geologists use plaster on Aug. 3 to cover a mammoth tusk found in Madison County, Miss. (Eddie Templeton)

By Jiselle Lee

August 14, 2024 at 10:45 p.m. EDT

Eddie Templeton traces his love of fossil-hunting to walks along a local creek as a boy in central Mississippi, trawling for bits of fossilized tree bark and shark teeth on trips with his father and sister.

None of that prepared Templeton, now 68, for his latest find: a 7-foot-long tusk from a Columbian mammoth that lived tens of thousands of years ago during the last Ice Age.

The lifelong Madison, Miss., resident was deep in river water on Aug. 3 when he saw something big sticking out of the mud in the distance. He quickly realized it was something unusual.

“I took photographs of what I could see and texted them to scientists that worked for the state and got an immediate call back from one of them,” Templeton said.

It’s the first recorded mammoth fossil of its kind discovered in the state — and it was entirely intact. That fact “makes it an extremely rare find for Mississippi,” the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality wrote in a blog post.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/08/14/mississippi-mammoth-tusk/