A man from the Saddle Lake Cree Nation, east of Edmonton, made the discovery of a lifetime while working on a project in his yard. Read more: Prehistoric shark tooth fossil discovered by young boy in central Alberta yard Jarrod Cardinal was digging a hole for a project in his yard — until his shovel struck a hard object roughly six feet in the ground. “I didn’t really know what is was at first,” Jarrod Cardinal said, not thinking much of it. “It was getting dark — I took it out of the dirt and threw it to the side.” He didn’t get a closer look until the next day. “I thought it was wood at first.
I was just puzzled by it. I didn’t know what it was, I thought maybe this is a tusk or something,” Cardinal said. “We’re like, ‘What is a tusk doing here?'” said Cardinal’s sister Carol Buffalo, who was there when he found the object. “It forms into a tusk if you put all the pieces together and there probably still is something under there still.” Pictures of the mystery find were sent to a paleontologist at the University of Alberta.
Not only is it old — but it comes from an animal you only see or hear about in museums. “An expert verified and they told us it was a mammoth tusk.
He’s an expert in that field and right away he said it was authentic,” Cardinal said. Read more: Mammoth bones, ‘ghost’ footprints: Did humans arrive in North America much earlier than we thought?