A construction worker made a once in a lifetime discovery when he found a giant woolly mammoth tooth. Justin Blauwet was working on a construction site in Iowa when he noticed something large and odd at his workplace. At first look, he mistook it for a large slab of stone with ridges that was little more than one foot in diameter.
According to reports, the father of two saw the fossil on March 4 while watching construction on property owned by Northwest Iowa Community College. The spectacular find turned out to be a giant woolly mammoth tooth weighing more than 11 pounds. Blauwet, a DGR Engineering employee did not require the assistance of specialists or archaeologists in order to identify the tooth. He credited his two boys and their passion for dinosaurs for teaching him how to identify the fossil.
2/2 Blauwet said that he has always been interested in fossils and pre-historic animals, even more so now as his two young sons have shown a huge interest in dinosaurs. That's how he was able to identify the distinct tooth. “I’m a ‘nerd’ like that,” he joked. #DGRSolutions pic.twitter.com/7FPWxMN4ht
— DGR Engineering (@dgrengineering) March 16, 2022
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The tooth, which was uncovered during an excavation at the site and measured 11 inches by 7 inches by 4 inches.
The DGR team contacted Tiffany Adrain, a Palaeontology Repository Instructor at the University of Iowa, for confirmation of Blauwet’s discovery. She noted: ‘While the discovery of mammoth remains is not uncommon in Iowa, once the bones and teeth are out in the open, they can fall apart and disappear quickly because they are not completely fossilised’. According to Adrain, the tooth is possibly over 20,000 years old.
Chris Widga, the chief curator at East Tennessee State University, estimated that the animal was in its 30s when it died. The discovery has been photographed and posted on various social media platforms which went viral.
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