Tim Blankenship, the 8th grade science teacher at Iola Middle School, went to Wyoming to hunt for fossils in 2003, with minimal success.
A couple of weeks later, he returned to his farm in Chetopa, just a couple miles north of the Oklahoma state line, where walking along the bank of the Neosho River he kicked what he thought was a rock. Upon closer examination, he realized it was part of a fossilized tooth from a mammoth, a species that became extinct thousands of years ago.
Over the next few years, Blankenship discovered several fossilized mammoth bones, including a large, almost fully intact molar.
Blankenship brought the tooth and several other bones, fossils and Native American artifacts for a presentation to Karen Price’s 7th grade history students Tuesday morning before the start of the Thanksgiving break.
He told students the history of mammoths in Kansas and passed around some of the bones for them to examine.
Mammoths roamed the earth for millions of years until they went extinct about 4,000 years ago.
The massive creatures that lived in this area weren’t the woolly mammoths most of us imagine. Instead, they were Columbian mammoths, which likely crossed the land bridge known as the Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia roughly 1.5 million years ago during the Ice Age. Woolly mammoths had thick fur and could handle the cold weather, but Columbian mammoths migrated south toward warmer areas in search of grass and other vegetation.
A variety of factors likely led to the extinction of mammoths at the end of the Ice Age, Blankenship told students. Maybe they couldn’t handle the changing climate that wiped out their food source. Maybe they died because of disease, or overhunting by man. Maybe it was a combination.
Whatever the cause, fossilized remains are all that’s left to tell their story.
Columbian mammoths were a little larger than their woolly counterparts, up to 14 feet at the shoulder and weighing up to 22,000 pounds with tusks that could grow 12 to 13 feet long. They likely lived about 65 years.
They had six sets of molar teeth that were replaced as if they were on a conveyor belt. New teeth would roll into place when the old ones fell out, Blankenship explained. Once the final set of molars fall out, the animal would die of starvation.
“So take care of your teeth, right?” Blankenship told students.
A mammoth’s molar tooth has ridges that would indicate how old the mammoth was, Blankenship said. The one he found has 11 ridges, which means it was likely one of the final sets. He theorizes the mammoth remains he found likely came from an animal that died at or near the end of its natural life.
Blankenship discovered the mammoth tooth in a gravel bar in the Neosho River.
“It was probably coming down to get something to drink,” he theorized. “Maybe it was attacked by an animal or it was diseased and it just died there on its own. Through the years the pieces of the mammoth became buried and fossilized and preserved. It was covered up for thousands of years. The river floods now and then and removes more and more debris. It washes away the bank and exposes more of the mammoth bone.”
