‘Everything’s bigger in Texas. Our mammoths are bigger, too’: 20,000- year-old mammoth remains discovered in Central Texas

BOSQUE COUNTY, Texas (KWTX) – It’s not everyday someone just stumbles across mammoth remains from thousands of years ago, but that’s exactly what happened to one central Texan.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Tarleton State Geoscience Department, and the Waco Mammoth National Monument are now all working together to safely dig up these fossils.

Back in June, Sabrina Solomon was just out on the lake, fishing with a friend, when she quite literally stumbled upon a portion of a fossil.

“I was walking up that hill with all the clay, it was really wet and slippery and I ended up falling, coming face to face with the specimen,” Solomon said

She noticed it looked strange, and she had a feeling that what she had found were more than just rocks.

“I told me best friend, ‘it’s dinosaur bones’ you know,” Solomon shared, “We thought it was actually like a spine to something, that’s what it looked like to us.”

So she alerted the park, and when Jarod Briscoe, the lead park ranger for the lake where the remains were found, got a look at them, he immediately reached out to Tarleton State’s Geoscience Department.

“I had made kind of an initial determination that I thought it was a mammoth whenever I got here, just based on my limited knowledge,” Briscoe said.

To confirm, Tarleton’s Geoscience Department sent out Kris Juntunen, an instructor with the department.

Crews work to excavate mammoth fossils found in Central Texas

“What I saw when I got here was about four to five inches of tusk… it was pretty clear this was a mammoth,” Juntunen explained.

He rounded up some students and got Dr. Lindsey Yann with the Waco Mammoth National Monument to come out and help with the excavation.

Once they had an entire crew on site, it didn’t take long to discover more fossils.

Dr. Yann shared that, “there’s part of what may be a skull, there’s a radius or part of an arm bone, and part of some of the spinal bones”.

From the fossils alone they determined this was a 40-year-old male Columbian Mammoth from roughly 20,000 years ago, similar to the ones on display at the Waco mammoth site.

“It’s so hard to imagine them walking through your backyard, so every time we find one in your backyard, it kind of triggers the imagination,” Dr. Yann said, “and even a small find like this and the other finds in this area, they really tell us about the paleontological history of this area”.

According to Juntunen, as the fossils are removed from the ground, they will head to Tarleton State University to be preserved and studied for years to come.

Right before the excavation started, two of the mammoth’s teeth were taken from the site, but thankfully were returned to the Bosque County Sheriff’s office.

To protect the site and prevent any further tampering, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers asked KWTX not to disclose the exact location of the mammoth bones until they are safely removed.

This also serves as a reminder that if you find anything that could be an archeological or paleontological discovery, leave it alone and reach out to the proper authorities.