Mammoth discovery in Myrtle Creek
MYRTLE CREEK, Ore. - A big discovery has been made in Myrtle Creek, and this story will take you back in time. A Myrtle Creek man took advantage of the weather and went for a dive in the Umpqua River.
At the bottom of the river, he made a mammoth discovery.
This truly is an amazing discovery that was actually first spotted years ago, but it wasn't until this week that a Myrtle Creek man re-lived history.
"It's quite heavy," says Eric Warner. It's a heavy load in more ways than one, pulling years of history out of the depths of the Umpqua River.
"It looked like a tusk and I thought it was a tusk, and there were bones there also," says Warner. It was a tusk, that belonged to a mammoth who roamed the Earth more than 10,000 years ago. But this discovery also goes years back.
"When I was a kid we used to come down here to the Umpqua and play in the river. I used to come down here looking for fish or crawdad or whatever, and once I noticed there was a tusk," says Warner.
Warner promised to return to this site when he got older. "I called the Douglas County Museum, but at that time no one had the funds or means to deal with it. So I've just had it in the back of my mind all this time that I was going to come down here when I got older and dig it up," he says.
So along with his own kids and a team of divers more than 20 years later, Warner watched history repeat itself, finding the rare tusk in the very same spot.
"We have had a few fossil finds here in Douglas County we have both Mammoth and Macedon remains that have been found in this area, so we're pretty lucky. We consider ourselves pretty fortunate to find these sorts of things in these environments," says Gardner Chappell, the Douglas County museum director.
When the divers arrived, they found the tip of the tusk was actually broken. Then it cracked in two places during excavation. But the breaks were clean, so the museum should be able to reconstruct the remains.
The Douglas County Museum already has one large pointy tooth from the extinct elephant in their possession.
