The fossilised tooth of a woolly mammoth has been discovered at a building site in San Francisco.
The tooth, which still has intact enamel, was dug up by a crane operator during an excavation for a new transit centre in the city.
The ten inches long, mud-coloured tooth has been called a ‘significant find’ by local paeleontologists who believe it could be 11,000 years old.
Big bite: The mammoth remains are displayed alongside a gold nugget also found at the construction site
The tooth was found at the construction site of the city’s new Transbay Transit Centre, a public transport hub being built in downtown San Francisco.
It is broken in two and missing a chunk, but is otherwise in relatively good condition.
‘It’s a big deal, so we can study it, get some age dates which help us figure out tectonics [and] seismicity like the San Andreas Fault,’ Jim Allen, a palaeontologist and geologist for the transit centre project, said.
Other woolly mammoth fossils have been found in the Bay Area, but Mr Allen said the discovery right in the middle of downtown San Francisco – as well as the tooth’s surprisingly good condition – was unusual.
The tooth is from the same era as fossils found in the La Brea Tar Pits in the Miracle Mile area of Los Angeles — a paleontological gold mine of Ice Age beasts that were trapped by asphalt bubbling upward through cracks and fissures. More than a million bones have been recovered from the ponds.
Bite-sized: The tooth held up and compared to a human fist
New find: The ten-inch tooth was uncovered during a dig to build a new transit centre
Brandon Valasik, the crane operator who made the discovery on Monday, told the San Francisco Chronicle that he was digging through sand about 110ft down when he noticed what resembled a rock but had an unusual shape and colour.
‘I was excavating using a hammer grab and going through a layer of sand, when suddenly I noticed some strange object that came out,’ he recalled.
‘It looked too perfect to be a rock.’
The transit centre construction site has yielded other treasures, including a gold nugget and artefacts from Irish neighbourhoods which dominated the area in the 19th century.
Extinct: The woolly mammoth lived during what’s called the Pleistocene Epoch, 1.8 million to 11,000 years ago
However, despite these discoveries, the building project has not halted.
‘Certainly if somebody were to come in and say we really think there may be a tusk or some hair or some skin, if it’s safe to do further excavation we will do that,” said Maria Ayerdi-Kaplan with the Transbay Joint Powers Authority.
The tooth appears to be from a Columbian mammoth, a relative of today’s elephants.
The Transbay Joint Powers Authority plans to donate the find to the California Academy of Sciences to exhibit.