A man who was having little luck catching salmon decided to look for fossils over the weekend and found a woolly mammoth tusk in the same Alaska location where his mother found one 22 years ago.
Andrew Harrelson found the 12-foot fossilised tusk on Sunday in a bend of the Fish River near his home village of White Mountain, the Alaska Dispatch News reported on Wednesday.
Tusks of woolly mammoth range in age from 12,000 to 400,000 years old.
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Dale Guthrie, a Quaternary Period palaeontologist who retired from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said the last glacial period in Alaska was about 18,000 years ago. Mainland mammoths died off by about 12,000 years ago, he said.
“The [White Mountain] tusks could be that young or they could be when mammoths first arrived here,” Mr. Guthrie said.