THE SCARBOROUGH, MAINE MAMMOTH; WHAT WE MISSED DURING THE 1959 EXCAVATION

In 1959 a tusk of an elephant was discoverd by a man digging a pit in the Presumscot glacial-marine clay in Scarborough, Maine. Initial research indicated the tusk was either that of a modern elephant or a mammoth. After a few ribs were found, the possibility arose that the remains were those of Old Bet, a circus elephant shot in 1816, and further search was halted. The tusk and ribs were donated to the Portland Museum of Natural History. By 1990 the tusk, now broken, had found its way to Presue Isle, Maine and to the cellar of an eccentric collector. The tusk was subsequently acquired by the Maine State Museum in Augusta. An initial AMS carbon-14 age of 10,500 BP showed that the Scarborough tusk did not belong to a destroyed circus elephant, but to a mammoth. More recent dates are soon to be published by the Maine Museum and the Maine Geological Survey. In the excitement and enthusiasm of discovering the remains of a huge creature from the Ice Age, the 1959 recovery team failed to look in the pile of debris taken from the pit, but instead poked around in the muddy hole. That pile was still beside the pit in the 1990's and of course contained the rest of the mammoth skeleton. The complete remains of the mammoth are now at the Maine State Museum. The glacial-marine clay in which the mammoth was buried is typically covered by a few meters of sand, A channel-like depression over the tusk may have been a groundwater-sapping channel in which the mammoth became mired and died.