Thursday, 4:30 PM
Fisherman may have caught prehistoric tusk
By Andrew Ryan, Globe Correspondent
A New Bedford-based boat dredging for scallops in Georges Bank off the coast of Maine may have pulled up something a little more interesting than shellfish. Tim Winchenbach hauled in a foot-long, curved, tusk-like object that scientists think may be a 13,000-year-old fossil from a prehistoric elephant.
Winchenbach, of Cushing, Maine, and his wife Michelle, took the black-and-brown speckled object home to try to determine if it belonged to a wooly mammoth. During their research, they sent photographs to Paula T. Work, the Curator of Zoology at the Maine State Museum in Augusta.
"My impression is that it's a mammoth or mastodon tusk," said Work, referring in the latter reference to an elephant relative of the wooly mammoth. "It's definitely from the Pleistocene," or last ice age, said Work, adding that she could not be completely certain until she examined the specimen.
Other fossils have been found on Georges Bank, where 13,000-year-old clay preserves the specimens from the salty waters of the North Atlantic Ocean.
Remains of the extinct breed of elephant, which had a covering of long hair, have been found in North America, Europe, Africa and Asia. They lived from 1.6 million years ago to around 10,000 years ago.
The tusk of an elephant unearthed in 1959 by a man digging in a pit in Scarborough, Maine, was first believed to be that of a circus elephant that was destroyed in 1816. However, after the tusk was acquired by the Maine State Museum, carbon dating indicated that it was a mammoth's.
Michelle Winchenbach is waiting for answers about her husband's find, but she already feels the thrill of holding something so old.
"Just the thought that I've held something that's potentially 10,000 years old or older, that nobody else in the world touched before us, I find it really fascinating," Winchenbach told WCSH-TV in Portland.
Material from the Associated Press was included in this report.
