The report came from the Alaska Dispatch News which said that Andrew Harrelson, a native of White Mountain, discovered the tusk in a bend of the Fish River found near his home village. It was a 12-foot fossilized tusk which weighed 162 lbs.
Andrew was three years old when his mother, Luann Harrelson, found a mammoth tusk fossil in the muck of the river. It was his father who pulled the 79-pound tusk from the water which became Andrew's cue to pose for a picture.
"This big, old log-looking thing. I had no clue what it was until they told me," said Andrew.
Andrew, now an adult, works in Nome but had to spend the weekend in White Mountain. He was actually out to go fishing for salmon. Feeling that he was out of luck, he decided to look for some fossils. It was then when he spotted the seemingly familiar tusk.
Tusks that belong to the wooly mammoth, an extinct animal, are said to be between 12,000 to 400,000 years old. They are usually sold at a resale market and can carry a price tag of as much as $75 for every pound.
The river bend where Andrew and his mother found the tusk is famous among the villagers who had attested that they found mammoth teeth in the area before.
"I think at one point, thousands of years ago, it must have been a mud hole or something that animals got stuck in and then died in it," said Daniel Harrelson, Andrew's father. "Everything froze in there and then slowly, over time, thaws out a little bit year by year."
Andrew's father flew the tusk to Anchorage and sold it to a local shop manager. The latter said that if only he had brought the tusk at least a week earlier, he can somehow get a big profit out of it. It turns out that the actor Steven Seagal had just been in the area and spent a huge sum on mammoth fossils.
Several weeks had passed and Andrew's parents didn't hear anything. After repeatedly asking the manager, he then said that the tusk was stolen from his garage. He paid his father only $1,500 as a way to appease him.
In Alaska, most of the land is considered as public land and there's a law that prohibits the removal of mammoth fossils from state and federal property without the necessary permit. As opposed to elephant ivory, the mammoth fossils that are discovered on a privately owned land can be traded legally under certain circumstances. According to a BLM spokeswoman, the area that surrounds White Mountain and the Fish River is considered as privately held.
