Fishing 12-year-old nets Ice Age bone in Embarras River
From the Herald & Review. Com
Monday, July 27, 2009 6:34 AM CDT
By TONY REID - H&R Staff Writer
GREENUP - Josh Brandenburg went angling for a mammoth catfish and came back with a big bit of mammoth instead.
The platter-size circular bone he fished out of the Embarras River is now setting off some elephantine ripples in the scientific community. Experts from the Illinois State Museum in Springfield say the size of the bone means it belonged to one of the biggest mammoths on record from Ice Age Illinois.
The bone also has some "chatter marks" on it, which suggest it was gnawed on by a big meat-eater or maybe even hungry prehistoric humans who had just nailed the mother of all pot roasts.
Either way, Josh's find is something special. The bone is anywhere from 13,000 to 24,000 years old and came from, most likely, a woolly mammoth or another mammoth type, the mammuthus Jeffersonii, which is named for Thomas Jefferson, a major prehistoric critter fan.
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