Ancient mammoth tusk offers gateway to Seattle's history

SEATTLE A backhoe, an apprentice plumber and a 20,000-year-old piece of ivory (give or take a few millenniums) have brought out Puget Sound's inner paleontologist.

Last week a Columbian mammoth tusk was discovered in the foundation of an apartment building under construction in the South Lake Union neighborhood. On Friday, three days after the discovery, scientists carefully crated the 81/2 -foot-long fossil and sent it to a museum for study.

In between, a steady stream of curious onlookers made their way to the giant hole across the street from an Amazon.com office building in hopes of getting a peek at the largest and most intact piece of prehistoric dentition ever discovered in Jet City.

That, of course, is the allure: ice age meets computer age.

Ryan Eyre, an unemployed English teacher, peeked through the chain-link fence baring "No trespassing" signs, hoping that the ancient ivory wasn't entirely covered up by a tarp.

It was, for its own protection.

"I came out entirely to see it," Eyre said. "I'm fascinated with this kind of stuff, and they found it within a mile of where I live."

Where tech workers troll and apartment buildings rise, herds of giant prehistoric proboscideans once roamed, grazing on verdant grasslands studded with the occasional pine, pounding down hundreds of pounds of roughage daily to nourish their vast bulk.

Mammoths migrated to North America from Asia about 2 million years ago and became extinct about 10,000 years ago. There is little agreement about what killed off the ancient relatives of today's elephants, but scientists point to a combination of climate change and hunting by humans.

Until last week, only 25 mammoth fossils had been found in the Seattle area, mostly skeleton fragments. So the discovery of a long, curving, intact tusk set paleontologists around the country abuzz.

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Ancient mammoth tusk offers gateway to Seattle's history