A mounted skeleton of the columbian mammoth (elephas columbi) By Henry Fairfield Osborn similar to the one excavated in Campbell, NE. This specimen was found near Jonesboro, IN in 1903.

The year was 1915. Campbell had outgrown its old frame school. Workers digging the foundation for a new brick schoolhouse made an amazing discovery. The tip of something that looked like an elephant tusk.

University of Nebraska researchers took over and found much more. Two full tusks from a twenty thousand-year-old Ice Age mammoth. Eleven feet long, thirty inches around. They also found the animal’s partiallyintact skull.

These are the original “Field Notes” from E. H. Barbour who led the excavation in Campbell, NE (below).  Some call him the father of Nebraska paleontology.

Credit:  NET (Nebraska’s PBS and NPR Station) http://netnebraska.org/interactive-multimedia/news/net-news-statewide-digging-past-92101

Additional materials on the Columbian Mammoth (Elephas columbi) (similar to the one found in Campbell, NE) can be found at Wikipedia