A toddler was throwing rocks in a Florida pond when he stumbled upon a woolly mammoth tooth last weekend, Florida Today reports. Monte Brigance told the paper he was watching his 2-year-old grandson Colt Couch toss rocks into the Palm Bay pond when the boy began to struggle to pull a rock up from the ground. “About half of this was sticking out of the soil, and he couldn't pull it up,” Brigance told the website. “So I pulled it up for him and got to looking at it—and I decided that we'd better not throw it away. We'll clean it up and see what it looks like.” Brigance told the newspaper that he initially thought what he found was a piece of asphalt, but later found out it was a woolly mammoth tooth. “Out of all the places my wife and I have been, looking for fossils — and yet we come to Florida and go to a pond, and there it is sticking out of the ground. It was a nice little find,” he said. Researchers told the newspaper that woolly mammoths were actually very common in Florida twenty thousand years ago, when the shore was 40 miles off today's coast. “I always think it’s amazing when archaeological discoveries are made like this—especially when everyday people just kind of stumble onto items like this,” Ben Brotemarkle, executive director of the Florida Historical Society, told the paper.
Read it at Florida TodayU.S. News
Two-Year-Old Finds Woolly Mammoth Tooth Near Florida Pond
LIVING IN THE ICE AGE
The toddler's grandfather initially thought the tooth was a piece of asphalt.
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