Mammoth of a find

By Emily Entress

Less than a month ago, local news stations buzzed with the discovery of Columbian Mammoth bones on a farm in Castroville, Calif.

A team of students and researchers, including approximately a dozen Santa Clara faculty and students, originally thought that they had found the bones of an adult female and a child.

Well, the official reports are in, and it turns out that the original hypothesis is not true.

"It's Jimmy!" exclaimed Dr. Timothy King, a professor of anthropology at Santa Clara as well as one of the principal investigators in the excavation of the Columbian Mammoth. "It ends up the mammoth is a male, late 20's to early 30's. We've had this verified by multiple sources, this is the official picture."

"Jimmy," named after the recently deceased original owner of the property where the bones were found, is approximately 20-25% unearthed, according to Dr. King.

The researchers have found pieces of the jaw, at least one molar and possibly part of a second one, ten ribs, seven vertebrae segments, the left forearm and upper arm, the left wrist and toe bones, as well as the back right tibia.

"You get to touch something that's, you know, upwards of thirty — possibly forty — thousand years old," commented Cameron Waggoner, a Santa Clara sophomore who is part of the excavation team. "That's pretty awesome."

"You're handling mammoth hair, you're looking at ivory in the ground in North America, it's pretty cool," he said.

The researchers are hoping to find some DNA hidden among the preserved tissue of the bone. Although their initial attempt failed to find DNA in the tip of the tusk, there are three other areas they can try, including the hair, the compact bone, and the molars.

Dr. King would particularly like to find DNA in the hair follicles, just to prove that it's the first specimen of Columbian Mammoth hair.

"I'm hoping we can get official DNA so we can say, ‘Oh! This is columbian mammoth hair' for  the official record, so later finds can reference it," said King.

The bones are being removed from the excavation site and taken to a staging facility at Foothill College, where the team can begin to clean and sort the bones. From there, the excavating team is still looking for a home for Jimmy.

"We're discussing the idea of having these (bones) available in a local public arena where anybody can see them," said King. "The unfortunate thing is these aren't things that we have that kids can handle; even the big bones are in hundreds of fragments, it's a mess."

Although the excavation site itself isn't overwhelmingly large, approximately 20' x 20', it appears to be a mess as well. Located in a  decidedly marshy area of Castroville, the excavation team has had to dig through nearly 40 centimeters of mucky clay to reach the majority of the bone fragments, many of which haven't seen sunlight since prehistoric times.

As the size and magnitude of this discovery is being unravelled, the team of excavators keeps growing.

One exciting new addition to the team is Trevor Valle, a lab supervisor for the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits, the world's only active urban Ice Age excavation site. Valle, a specialist in paleontology, was recently named the fourth principle investigator on the Jimmy case.

The original three principle investigators are King, from Santa Clara, Mark Hylkema, an archeologist who works for the parks department, and Dan Cearley from Foothill College.

On top of the principle investigators, there are approximately 55 other members of the excavation team, which includes students, faculty and specialists from several Bay Area institutions, including Foothill College, San Jose State, De Anza, Cabrillo, UC Santa Cruz, UCLA, UC Berkeley, and Santa Clara.

"It's not just a community of Santa Clara students working together," said Dr. King. "They are embracing the bigger community of scholars and students in the same field they're in, and in related fields, and that we all get to work together on this. As far as I know, nothing like this has happened for a long time around here."

In fact, there has been a core group of approximately six or seven Santa Clara students who religiously attend the dig dates at the site, including Cameron Waggoner, junior William Abriel, junior John Ward, senior Maxine Devincenzi, and senior Nicole Mathwich.

For almost all of these students, this is the first significant dig in which they have had the opportunity to participate.

"It's been a lot of fun to meet all the people who are into archaeology and who are part of the archeological community in the Bay Area, and to kinda get their experience and meet them, to see what they're doing and what projects they are working on." said Mathwich.

The team has come far in the two and a half months that they have been excavating, however they still have a long road ahead of them.

According to King, he is hoping to be done excavating in a month.

Luckily, there is a staff of hard-working students who are willing to commit almost all of their free time to helping with the excavation process.

"They believe in this too, as much as the researchers do," said Dr. King. "They're part of something really cool and really big."

Contact Emily at eentress@scu.edu or call (408) 554-4546.