Mammoth fossil successfully moved to Santa Barbara
A mammoth fossil excavated from the Channel Islands has now made its way to the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.
The delicate mammoth skull with both tusks was loaded onto a Mammoth moving truck at the Ventura Harbor Tuesday morning. This special “Mammoth” truck was built to move more than just mammoths, but really anything that’s fragile.
After the 35-mile journey researchers carefully opened the box at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History to make sure the fossil was still intact.
“It’s perfect. It survived, just great,” said archaeologist Don Morris with a smile.
“The specimen comes to the museum in order to go through the process of preparing that excavated skull. So that is removing the rest of the matrix that is still encased on the specimen, and stabilizing the underlying bone and tooth material that is associated with that part of that skull to be able to store the specimen or put it on exhibit for an extended period of time without having further damage to it,” said museum curator Paul Collins.
The estimated 13,000 year-old fossil will now be meticulously cleaned and analyzed so researchers can learn more about how the now extinct mammoths once live on our channel islands.
