Tusk in a Coal Mine

Robert also sent in this link – https://phys.org/news/2024-01-coal-miners-north-dakota-unearth.html … coal miners in North Dakota unearth a mammoth tusk that had been buried for thousands of years. Notice – coal miners rather than a coal mine. The tusk was brought up in a load using an electric shovel. Note also -m thousands of years rather than millions of years. There was no mammath tusk or bones found in a coal seam. This was an open cast coal site. To get at the coal they had to dig out a lot of soil and geology. The mammoth remains were in the soil – and we don’t know much about the rest of the geology. What was surprising to the operators was that the tusk was 7 feet long – and its whitish colouration attracted the gaze of the shovel operator and the dump truck driver. We also learn that the operators had to go down 40 feet to access the coal seam – so there was a lot of geology on top. The mammoth was in the dirt. So, no tunnels through the coal seam and no actual miners, in the classic sense. Steam shovels, or in this case, an electric shovel, was in use, with the spoil taken away in dump trucks. Yet they spotted the tusk in the spoil – as it was white, or looked white against the colour of the geology. The good thing is that the operators contacted a geology department and they came down to investigate. It was not an everyday thing to dig up a mammoth tusk. In North Dakota. The geologists were allowed to look for the rest of it and came up with a stream of bones – such as shoulder blades, ribs, teeth, etc. They all came from a single specimen. As such, the mammoth must have been buried fairly quickly.