Landowner to decide fate of Seattle mammoth tuskExpert: Fate of mammoth tusk found at Seattle construction site entirely up to landowner
Associated Press
By Donna Gordon Blankinship, Associated Press 1 hour ago
Workers build forms Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2014, around the area at a construction site in Seattle where what is believed to be an ice age mammoth tusk was discovered on Tuesday. Work pouring cement at the site was continuing, but workers blocked off the area where the tusk was found. Paleontologists from the University of Washington hope to move the tusk to a museum on campus. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren) SEATTLE (AP) -- A national expert said Thursday that the fate of the mammoth tusk found at a construction site in downtown Seattle this week is entirely up to the landowner.
Washington state has no laws governing finds of this type. And Jack Horner of the Museum of the Rockies and Montana State University said that is true anywhere in the United States.
"Americans like their private land," said Horner, one of the nation's most famous paleontologists. Americans don't like to pass laws putting restrictions on owners of private land, even to protect history, he said.
There are some protection laws in Canada. In the province of Alberta, for example, a find like a mammoth tusk would automatically belong to the province, Horner said.
He hopes the landowner in this case will donate the tusk to the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Washington. It's a relatively rare find and should be preserved for educational reasons, so kids will know mammoth elephants once lived in Seattle, he said.
"A lot of times, people think these things are worth a lot of money," Horner said. Their true value is educational, not what someone can sell a tusk for on eBay, he said.
Calls and emails to AMLI Residential, the company constructing an apartment building on the land, were not returned.
Mammoth elephants lived all over the United States and Europe in ancient times, but finding a tusk or any part of those animals is rare, Horner and other experts said.
"We don't find them every year or even every five years," he said. In most cases artifacts found at construction sites are destroyed by a big machine before anyone even notices them, Horner said.
Allyson Brooks, the Washington state preservation officer, said the situation would be different if construction workers had found human remains or other items or archaeological value, because Washington state has laws for those situations.
With paleontological finds, the landowner can do whatever he wants — sell it, destroy it, donate it or ignore it, Brooks said.
In 2004, Washington state halted construction on a section of a major bridge project, on which $58 million had already been spent, at the request of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe after remains of an ancient Indian village and burial ground was discovered.
Discoveries of animal remains from the Ice Age are less common than human remains in western Washington. Preservation of bone and tusks depends on the environmental conditions, such as the water table, the acidity of the soil, how deeply the object was buried, Brooks said.
"A lot of time, teeth preserve better than other bones," she said, linking tusks to teeth. She said teeth and tusks are what she and the scientists she works with consider "biological rock."
The last big find of an ancient animal of this sort in western Washington happened in 1977, when a Mastodon tusk was found near Sequim, Wash., on the Olympic Peninsula.
Mammoths and Mastodons are related and probably roamed the Earth around the same time. Both were very large and hairy. Mammoths and modern-day elephants are members of the same biological family.
Gov. Jay Inslee did not wish to comment on the tusk discovery, but a member of his team had something to say.
"This has turned every adult in Seattle back into a 10-year-old," said the governor's spokeswoman, Jaime Smith.
http://news.yahoo.com/landowner-decide-fate-seattle-mammoth-192109736.html
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