9. Tusks Up!

Charlotte Buchanan-Yale is greeted every day when she comes to work by the sight, and sometimes the sound, of a magnificent creature named Tusker.

The woolly mammoth skeleton is 12 feet tall and 17 feet long, says Buchanan-Yale, director of the Museum of Native American History in Bentonville, and it's been on display at the front of the museum since April. A motion sensor triggers a roaring sound from the skeleton, she says. Part of the museum's permanent collection, Tusker has been visited by a few thousand children who are "in awe of him," she adds.

"It just makes you think that you are walking on layers of time."

Tusker, who was named by local student Hayden Poe, was assembled from pieces collected from three different specimens, according to a May 9 What's Up! article. Museum creator David Bogle said then that he looked for a skeleton for several years, and this particular creature was assembled from pieces found in Siberia and dating to about 12,000 years ago. Bogle confirmed the purchase in January, and the one-ton skeleton was disassembled and trucked to Bentonville. A professional crew spent about eight hours putting Tusker back together at the entrance of the museum.

Tusker is the only vertebrate fossil of its kind on exhibit in Northwest Arkansas, although the University of Arkansas museum collections include a Pleistocene mammoth found northeast of Hazen in 1965. According to Bogle, the skeleton will help the museum interpret the history of native people in the Americas dating back to the Paleo period when humans hunted mammoths.

Buchanan-Yale says the museum will have some amazing things happening in 2015, among them the addition of artifacts and a new book on the museum.

"We have a lot of little tricks up our sleeves."

-- Ashley Batchelor

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