Just over a month after its excavation on Santa Rosa Island, an unusually complete mammoth skull arrived Tuesday at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, where it will be prepared for scientific study.
According to the United States Geological Survey, which dated charcoal samples next to the skull, the mammoth lived approximately 13,000 years ago in what is today Channel Islands National Park.
“This is exceptional because as far as I know, this is only the second skull that’s been recovered from the (Channel) Islands with both tusks still set in the skull,” said Don Morris, a retired National Park Service archeologist who dug up the specimen with paleontologist Justin Wilkins and preparator Monica Bugbee.
“It’s also the only one I know of where the cranium is almost completely intact,” he told Noozhawk.
The skull arrived in a crate and fully encased in a plaster jacket for protection. It was delivered from Ventura by Mammoth Moving and Storage.
According to the National Park Service, the mammoth’s age coincides with that of Santa Rosa Island’s Arlington Man, the oldest human skeletal remains on the continent.
Columbian mammoths are believed to have swum out from the mainland to the Channel Islands, Morris said, which were closer to the coast a million years ago than they are today.
Modern elephants, he said, are inclined to swim as far as 30 miles with the right motivation.
Paul Collins, the museum’s curator of vertebrate zoology, said that in terms of size, the specimen is right between the 14-foot-high Columbian mammoth and the 6-foot pygmy mammoth, which evolved from the Columbian mammoth on the island.
(Sam Goldman / Noozhawk photo)
Collins speculated that the specimen might have been at an evolutionary stage between the two closely-related species. There is also speculation that the mammoth was a juvenile Columbian.
The rest of the bones are unaccounted for and would require further excavation, Morris said.
“A specimen like this, it’s not going to answer just one question,” Collins said. “It depends on the research scientists who access the specimen, who obtain sub-samples off the specimen for the respective aspects of the studies they will engage in.”
New information is continually gleaned from the museum’s mammoth and vertebrate collections, he said, when research scientists come in with new tools and techniques with which to study their fossils.
While a considerable amount of work went into excavating the skull — it took two years after its discovery to determine the feasibility and costs of digging it up — the skull has probably four to five months of sustained prep work before it can be studied, Morris said.
— Noozhawk staff writer Sam Goldman can be reached at sgoldman@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
