It was a construction worker's dream (maybe) when members of a crew discovered the bone of a Colombian mammoth (ancestor to the woolly mammoth) in Washington State last week, the Seattle Times reported. Because it was a chunk of leg bone and not the tusk (which, at full size, can fetch a sizeable fee), the find was actually more important for local paleontologists like Lee Sappington, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Idaho.
Sappington brought graduate students to the site of discovery -- on the border between Washington and Idaho -- with the hopes of finding more fossils. The team from Idaho will excavate the area about 12 feet, or the depth at which the fossilized leg bone was found.
The ultimate goal is to uncover the remains of ancient humans, according to Nature World News. If they do, then the discovery becomes significant. Woolly/columbian mammoth fossils aren't that rare in the state of Washington. They've been found in nearly every county and are the official state fossil.
The piece of leg bone belonged to a Columbian mammoth, which traveled from Asia into North America via the Bering Land Bridge about a million years ago, according to the mammothsite. Columbian and woolly mammoths interbred, but it was the Columbians that became one of the last megafauna, or giant animals, to become extinct.
Fourteen feet tall and 8-10 tons in mass, Columbian mammoths were significantly larger than woolly mammoths, which stood 11 feet and weighted between 6 and 8 tons. They were capable of consuming 700 pounds of vegetation per day and lived for 60 to 80 years.
