RYE HARBOR, H.H. — February 21, 2013 — As Mike and Padi Anderson sold their catch of scallops on the dock Wednesday night in Rye Harbor, N.H., it was not just their shellfish that drew people’s interest. It was an object that looks like a 6-inch-long tooth that Mike had dredged up from the ocean earlier that day.
Mike said he casually throws away lots of rocks, wood shards, and other debris that come up in his nets, but as he sifted through the scallops Wednesday afternoon, the strange item caught his eye. A crew member e-mailed a picture to a geologist from the University of New Hampshire, and a short while later the verdict came back: The tooth almost certainly belonged to a woolly mammoth.
“It’s just a wild feeling to hold something that was living 10,000 years ago in your hand,” Padi Anderson said.
The tooth weighs about 5 pounds and still has remnants of the root that connected it to the mammoth’s gums, Mike Anderson said in a phone interview from the deck of his boat, the F/V Rimrack.
Read the full story at The Boston Globe