[Music Playing]
[Eggenbroad] What I'm doing, so you know, I'm getting a little less overburdened and if we're
real lucky i'll show you the tip of the tusk very shortly which none of us have seen yet.
Don't go in there too deep. Just go to here. Yeah! What we're going to do
is very carefully uh clean this sand back. we know that the tusk is in here. I've
seen a portion of it. In fact uh, right here. So it's gonna come about like so and this
is all we've seen so far is this one's gonna be that more more of an angle. So let's be
real gentle. There it is. Oh yeah! It's curving.
That's a tip. It is. That's beautiful. Yep! That is beautiful. The whole thing is
beautiful. Oh wow. That's a nice crack in it. Yeah they usually will. That's nice.
Let's don't go down any deeper on the sides. Leave it on a very big pedestal.
Okay the closest thing to personality that I ever get with a
fossil elephant is to feel the wear bevel with the tips of my fingers.
That's a nice, quite warm, nice point. I'd say this is probably going to be a male and
the reason I say that is that's a pretty darn big tusk for a dwarf mammoth.
Greetings. We charge admission now that we got something to show. That's all right .
That's all right. We still charge admission. I don't work for the park.
Cast your papers in there and tell me what you see. It is a tusk. Awfully nice.
[Narrator] That afternoon flights from Ventura brought family members, the
media and tourists excited to see the tusk of a prehistoric animal.
[Morris] Analyze what came before us, how it evolved, how it developed how it became extinct.
[Herbert Machueden] Just the idea of this thing being here waiting to be discovered
in 1994 I think uhh..
especially for young people it'd be very exciting to realize that there's discoveries
to be made all the time. If your eyes are open and your interest is there and you
understand the environment around you.
[Morris] Actually pretty lucky that as much of the animal is still there as it is
because it looks like the channel came down right on top of the bone
and deposited some cobbles right in with the bones and didn't take most of
the bones away we're finding a few fragments below the main elephant
downstream and we hope to find more of them. We're actually quite fortunate
that the channel didn't take it all out and most of the animals still intact.
but apparently it may well have taken the right tusk.
[Narrator] Even without the right tusk if the rest of the skeleton is intact
this will be a historic find. They continue to dig never knowing what the next day will reveal
[Narrator] Five days after embarking on their journey the scientists
have succeeded in finding the first ever complete skeleton of a pygmy mammoth.