Mastodon Tusks/ discovery

[amargasaurus cazaui]

I thought I would share this although it is NOT dinosaur related. It happened a long time back and is not that amazing but still.......

It was the tail end of October of 1966 as near as I can reconstruct the story from my fathers words. He was working with a crew that was trenching a new sewer line in our town. They were running a line across an old field, at a depth of twenty feet. The trencher being used was capable of excavating via a moving bucket method , a ditch four feet wide in a straight path indefinitely. At some point the machine was working along and the workers noticed the windrow of fresh dirt contained a layer of white material towards the top. Then the machine ground to a halt, stalled out. They had struck something massive underground that was thick and hard enough to stall the massive trencher. First bets were an uncharted pipeline or a petrified tree. The only thing that seemed odd was the object was white. Apparently they had chewed one end off the object, but it ran into the ground at the side of the trench for many feet. So they dug it out, and then used a crane and lifted it out. The portion they could safely extract was over eight feet long.
  My grandfather was the towns local rock hound and he identified it as ivory rather quickly. Apparently they had chewed right into a mastodon tusk. A few weeks later, he and my father located another smaller tusk along the edge of a trench in another area about 300 feet from the first find. They removed it and brought it home to keep as well. A few notes to help understand what is pictured. These were construction workers in Poh Dunk , USA, in 1966 so when they found this, they tried to figure out how best preserve it and settled on using tung oil, hence the odd coloration. My father said the ivory had not fossilized, and was water logged. The workers all were squabbling over the thing , and everyone wanted a piece, so they used a tree saw and cut it into sections to divide it up. The long piece you see in the pictures is the end piece my father kept, and the shorter round, another mans section, that my father purchased.
  So I grew up with the box under the pool table, that had a glass lid and holds " the tusk" and this story being told at family get togethers and what not. I decided to take my father back to the original site and let him walk me through it all and tell me the story. I am writing it up to have published in  a local clubs newsletter soon, and figured i would share the photos and story. Today he is the only one left alive from the crew, as the find was 46 years ago
I also hoped perhaps to get some thoughts about one odd aspect of this matter. The tusks were both found in the southeastern end of kansas. It has been suggested or commented that they were encased in barnacles, and that is what the rough little pebbled areas are around the edges. I am uncertain about this myself. The level the tusks were found, the groundsoil was saturated with water, and they were running pumps just to be able to work safely. My understanding is that barnacles would be a saltwater thing however. Could these tusks have been exposed to barnacles while immersed in glacial deposits? Or was there a salt water ocean here within the last ten thousand years? It was not my understanding that would be likely. Anybody that might offer some understanding on that one would be most useful. The final picture I believe shows what the small rough pebbled items look like. They could easily be small infill pieces of rock, but apparently somewhere along the line someone suggested they were barnacles.


PS. I know I pictured the stuff with a mammoth, but I do not have a nice figure of a Mastodon yet to use for the pictures so I used what i had for now. Work with me here.















I also thought to clarify a few things. In the pictures you see some white spheres. These are original cue balls made back in the 1800's (I would guess) which were made of ivory. I am unsure what they have to do with this story, however if any of you have a father like mine, in his early seventies and somewhat certain how the world should work...you will understand it was easier to add the ivory spheres to make him happy then not.Similar concept the mamoth teeth at the other edge of the picture. They were NOT found with the tusks, or anywhere within the area, but were flea market purchases at a later date. However, it would  be simpler removing teeth from a live mammoth than removing these from the pictures we took so, there you go.

[ZoPteryx]

What a great discovery and story Amargasaurus!   That definentley is a tusk of some sort.  I have no clue about the presence of barnacles on it though.   Sea levels should have been down during the Ice Age, so I'd imagine Kansas certainly wouldn't have had any salt water.  My question would be whether or not the tusks actually belong to a Mastodon, and not some more ancient type of elephant.

[amargasaurus cazaui]

What a great discovery and story Amargasaurus!   That definentley is a tusk of some sort.  I have no clue about the presence of barnacles on it though.   Sea levels should have been down during the Ice Age, so I'd imagine Kansas certainly wouldn't have had any salt water.  My question would be whether or not the tusks actually belong to a Mastodon, and not some more ancient type of elephant.

Many years back as a kid, I sent in a fragment to the Museum in Denver to ask clarification. They sent back an opinion stating it was likely Mastodon, in their opinion, based on the small piece they examined. I had always mentally linked the tusks to Mammoths, so it took me awhile to get that image changed in my mind.
As a sidenote to the story, I went back over a few weeks ago and sealed the entire pile with B-12 to help protect and seal it better. It was obvious when i took the pictures the original coating of tung oil they had applied is breaking down and the material might eventually crumble.