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It’s been thousands of years since the woolly mammoths that used to roam the Northern Hemisphere went extinct. However, their former habitat is still littered with evidence of their existence, including a nearly 100-pound bone that seemingly belonged to one of those massive creatures that a man recently plucked from a river in Missouri.
The African bush elephant is the largest animal (and, in turn, the largest mammal) that can be found on land today, as they can stand at upwards of 13 feet and tip the scales at over 20,000 pounds.
Elephants belong to the Proboscidean order, which is currently comprised of the three distinct species of elephants in existence (the African forest and Asian varieties round out the trio). However, there are around 160 extinct species that fall under that umbrella, including mastodons and woolly mammoths.
The planet is still filled with the bones of those bygone animals, and it’s not too difficult to find them in the wild if you know where to look. One man who has made a concerted effort to track them down recently headed to a hotspot in Missouri, and he went viral after documenting a very impressive find.
A prehistoric bone hunter discovered a massive mammoth bone in a river in Missouri
It’s believed the first woolly mammoths arrived in North America after crossing the Bering Strait approximately 100,000 years ago. The animals established a sizeable presence on the continent, but hunting and climate change led to them going virtually extinct around 10,000 years ago (although there’s evidence that a population on St. Paul Island in Alaska held out for a few more millennia before meeting the same fate).
Missouri is just one of a number of states where mammoths once roamed, and an amateur paleontologist named Jason Howery has made it his mission to track down evidence of those animals and other creatures that had their heyday during the Ice Age in the northwest region of the state.
Howery recently visited a site in the vicinity of the town Ravenwood that is known for being a bit of a hot spot for bones, and he came across an awesome discovery in a river in the form of a massive mammoth femur that he came across while exploring.
Howery estimated the bone, which he believes belonged to a Columbian mammoth, weighed 80 pounds when he picked it up, and he confirmed that number was actually 92 pounds after conducting an examination that concluded it was also 54 inches in length.
That’s quite the find.