Bored angler finds tusk of mammoth

Friday, August 15, 2014

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — A man who was having little luck catching salmon decided to look for fossils over the weekend and found a woolly mammoth tusk in the same Alaska location where his mother found one 22 years ago.

Andrew Harrelson found the 12-foot fossilized tusk Sunday in a bend of the Fish River near his home village of White Mountain about 63 miles east of Nome, the Alaska Dispatch News reported Wednesday.

Harrelson was 3 in 1992 when his mother, Luann Harrelson, spotted a 79-pound mammoth tusk fossil in the muck of the river. His father pulled it from the water, and Andrew posed for a picture with it.

“This big, old log-looking thing,” he said. “I had no clue what it was until they told me.”

Harrelson drove back to White Mountain and returned with a relative. Together, they pried out the fossil. He weighed it on a bathroom scale and it registered 162 pounds.