Second Tusk

September 11, 2012

This Tuesday dig was organized to coincide with the morning and afternoon laboratory sections of Janet Ewart’s Anatomy class, William Penn University. Janet met David and Holmes at 9:00 with about 20 students; they were given a 15 minute review on the differences between mammoths and mastodons and then walked 200 yards to the excavation. Farmer John had pumped entrapped water down the night before but two feet of water had refilled the excavation. The sump pump was restarted and the water removed. Unfortunately, the pump did not work on the two feet of underlying slop, described by Wm. Penn TV anchor Maureen McKamey, as ‘disgustingly repugnant.’ Jason Madison filmed the activities anyway. The students went into the muck without hesitation and shortly bones were being excavated on the east (downstream) and south (right bank) walls. Sarah arrived just after noon having participated in a video production featuring the Museum of Natural History for a televised production on the best places in Iowa to visit.  The east wall area yielded a rib and a vertebra and the south area a second tusk (broken into at least four parts), a piece of skull (nasal?), two vertebrae and three ribs or rib fragments.  All remains in this jumble were more gently sloping down to the north (picture Sarah & Jim North) than those collected last week, some of which were nearly vertical. These also weathered blue-clay slump clasts separated by sand stringers (as those which the Archaic projectile point recovered previously) as opposed to from coarser-grained, fluvial-like material with more organics. Overall, the top of the bone bed is higher here than toward the Discovery Pit. Upon completion of the dig, the tusk was removed to Farmer John’s basement and the previously collected mammoth cranium, residing in Farmer John’s barn since the last dig, was loaded onto Sarah’s truck for transport to the UI Museum of Natural History. We departed the site around 6:30 PM.