Student found mammoth tusk on SoCal island

A graduate student had found a complete tusk on Santa Cruz Island off the Southern California coast when they working in canyon on the island's remote north shore earlier this month.The complete tusk is believed A complete tusk believed to belong to a prehistoric mammoth. If the discovery is confirmed, it would mean the tusked beasts roamed 62,000-acre Santa Cruz Island more widely than previously thought.

Nearby the tusk were several rib bones and possible thigh bones, said Lotus Vermeer, the Nature Conservancy's Santa Cruz Island project director.

"We've never discovered mammoth remains in this particular location on this island before," Vermeer said.

The Nature Conservancy and a leading mammoth expert will excavate the remains next week and use radiocarbon dating to determine their age.

Santa Cruz Island is the largest of eight islands that make up California's Channel Islands. During the Pleistocene epoch, more than 10,000 years ago.

Judging by the tusk size,around 4 feet long,it might have belonged to a pygmy mammoth, Vermeer said.

The most complete skeleton of a prehistoric pygmy mammoth was excavated in 1994 on Santa Rosa Island. It's rare to find mammoth remains on Santa Cruz Island, probably because its steep terrain was inhospitable to pygmy mammoths.

In 2005, researchers discovered mammoth thigh and forelimb bone fragments on Santa Cruz. Ten years earlier, a partial tusk was unearthed. Both discoveries were from a Columbian mammoth.