More mammoth bones recovered by University of Michigan paleontologists in Chelsea-area

More mammoth bones were recovered by University of Michigan researchers this week at a farm near Chelsea, Michigan.

University of Michigan paleontologists conducted a second excavation this week at the Chelsea-area farm where the skull, tusks and dozens of intact bones of an ice age mammoth were pulled from the ground in late 2015.

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Nothing that dramatic happened during the two-day follow-up. But 40 additional bones and bone fragments from the Bristle Mammoth were recovered, and the researchers were able to thoroughly document the site. That just wasn't possible two years ago, in the one-day rush to get the skull and tusks out of the ground.
 
"This return to the Bristle site was absolutely a success. We got the kind of information that we need to do the science right, and we were also able to recover an impressive amount of additional material from this animal," said U-M paleontologist Daniel Fisher, who led both Bristle digs and who is overseeing the analysis of the bones and the environmental samples.
 
"So I'm confident that as a result of this second excavation, we'll have more insight into what happened here," said Fisher, director of the U-M Museum of Paleontology.

The oldest well-documented, published evidence for humans in Michigan is about 13,000 years ago, the age of the spear-wielding Clovis hunters. But several lines of evidence from the Bristle Mammoth, including the single radiocarbon date, imply that humans processed the carcass more than 2,000 years before the Clovis hunters arrived.


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