June 7, 2007

Boys Make a Mammoth Find

Explorers – McMinnville 10-year-olds discover a tooth, and the adventure is on

McMINNVILLE — The shock isn’t that the earth yawned open and bared a mammoth’s tooth several weeks back; it’s how everyone now knows about two 10-year-old boys’ secret hideaway.

That densely wooded ravine — which just produced the 10-pound, geologist-affirmed tooth of a 9-year-old mammoth — has revealed all sorts of other wonders to Charlie Gilpin and Bryant Ashton in the past.

Lizards. Dead deer. A kind of plant that tastes like licorice. And grass crumpled by Sasquatch. During the time they’ve been friends, it’s been the place where they can be Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Or prehistoric adventurers. But now they really are famous explorers.

“It was so weird because this was a place that me and Charlie always used to come to just explore and use our instinct and talk amongst ourselves,” said Bryant, skeetering Wednesday down a tangled path beneath towering maples and twining vines.

Now, they’re speaking to scores of people — including scientists, teachers, students and journalists — about “the dig,” a place by the stream that runs near Charlie’s home into the South Yamhill River, where the boys found the tooth.

At first, they thought it was a boot sticking out of the mud, said Charlie. In fact, they did nothing for days but spook each other with stories about whose boot it was. A dead hiker’s? A wanderer who had run into Sasquatch? Sasquatch is territorial, Bryant says, which is why — since one terrifying afternoon when the boys’ heard something hooting like an owl and lurching through the foliage — they’ve decided to give him space by staying on their of the ravine.

Then, last week, the boys decided to give the boot a pull and saw it was no such thing.

So their families called in journalists and a real scientist, William Orr, retired University of Oregon geologist and director of the Thomas Condon State Museum of Fossils at the University of Oregon.

Orr gets about a dozen such teeth from around Oregon every year, he said, but many are deteriorated and “crumble like popcorn” at the first washing. He praised the boys’ tooth as “a beauty.”

“It’s in excellent condition, and what’s more exciting is that that tooth — that fourth molar — was in the animal when it croaked.”

The two- to three-ton animal died on a bad day roughly 12,000 to 15,000 years ago. Back then, major predators were saber-toothed tigers, which Orr explained were actually more like gigantic bobcats and huge Dire wolves.

For the boys — who’ve been toting the tooth from class to class at McMinnville’s Cook Elementary School — that means major summer plans. Calling in a little help from adults, they say they want to chart out a map showing where they’ve already dug and where they plan to dig.

Rubbing mud onto his hand where some nettles stung him, Charlie said that he’s learned through finding the tooth that he likes helping other children learn about as much as he likes exploring.

“They’ve been asking lots of questions every time I bring it to school,” he said. “I like talking about this, and I’ve learned a lot so I can answer most of the questions. And then if I don’t know, I say I’ll find out for them, and I do.”Kate Taylor
The Oregonian

Filed under Bigfoot, Bigfoot Report, Cryptozoology, Evidence, Extinct, Fossil Finds, Sasquatch