Fishing 12-year-old nets Ice Age bone in Embarras River

Monday, July 27, 2009 6:34 AM CDT

By TONY REID - H&R Staff Writer

GREENUP - Josh Brandenburg went angling for a mammoth catfish and came back with a big bit of mammoth instead.

The platter-size circular bone he fished out of the Embarras River is now setting off some elephantine ripples in the scientific community. Experts from the Illinois State Museum in Springfield say the size of the bone means it belonged to one of the biggest mammoths on record from Ice Age Illinois.

The bone also has some "chatter marks" on it, which suggest it was gnawed on by a big meat-eater or maybe even hungry prehistoric humans who had just nailed the mother of all pot roasts.

Either way, Josh's find is something special. The bone is anywhere from 13,000 to 24,000 years old and came from, most likely, a woolly mammoth or another mammoth type, the mammuthus Jeffersonii, which is named for Thomas Jefferson, a major prehistoric critter fan.

But whether woolly or Jeffersonii, it was big: The expert guess is it stood anywhere from 11 to 13 feet at the shoulder, and maybe even bigger, with a weight that could tip the scales at 4 tons.

The bone is actually an "atlas vertebra," which attached the animal's massive head to its neck. "And this remains one of the largest atlas vertebrae we've seen," said Chris Widga, Ph.D., assistant curator of geology at the Illinois State Museum Research and Collections Center.

"We thought it was just a cow's pelvis or something," said Josh, 12, who was fishing in a boat with his dad, David, and brothers Zack, 13, and Alex, 16. Instead of throwing it back, though, they took it home and began trampling all over the Internet trying to find out what it was. They eventually hit on sites that identified it as an atlas bone from a mammoth, which wasn't a bad result for four hours point-and-click work with a mouse.

Josh plans to head back to the now top-secret catfishing spot, cast his rods aside and become a fisher of mammoths. "I kind of like big animals," he said. "We're going to look for more bones."

His dad and his mom, Tricia, were surprised to discover that mammoth bones can command prices into the hundreds and even many hundreds of dollars. But Josh and the family decided the right thing to do was hand their atlas over to the Illinois State Museum and bask in the glory of a grateful science along with official recognition that the find is what they thought it was.

"I didn't want my boy accused of being nuts because he claims to have found this cool mammoth bone, but nobody believed him," said Dad, who works in highway maintenance for the state of Illinois. "Now this find has got all my kids thinking and researching and using their brains instead of just spending the summer hanging out of a tree or something. You got kids? You know what I mean. Finding this bone has been pretty neat for us."

Jeffrey Saunders, Ph.D., who also works in the Illinois State Museum's Research and Collections Center and has a mammoth job description - quaternary vertebrate paleontology curator and chairman, geology section - said Josh Brandenburg's name will live forever.

"He has received a certificate of appreciation from the Illinois State Museum, suitable for framing, and we do everything we can to praise him," Saunders said. "His name will be forever associated with that bone as the finder."

Saunders, who has Beanie Baby mammoths sitting on his computer monitor and whose English family name features three elephants in its coat of arms, has a soft spot for mammoths. He suspects they were like modern-day elephants in their behavior: intelligent and moving around in matriarchal family units and willing to risk it all to protect each other.

He says baby mammoth mummies dug out of the permafrost of Siberia have given even scientists aw-shucks moments. "Three feet tall, three feet long, with a long little trunk and cute little ears," he said. "You see just how cute and compelling these mammoths were."

But just like their dinosaur predecessors, Mother Nature finally drew a line under them, and all that remains of their extinct species are the remains they left to a puzzled posterity. "Just what did happen to them?" Saunders asks. "That is the $64,000 question."

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