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A farmer near Chelsea made a startling discovery Monday night: bones of a woolly mammoth possibly butchered by early human hunters thousands of years ago.

James Bristle and a friend were digging in a soy field off of Scio Church Road west of Fletcher in Washtenaw County's Lima Township when they came up with something very out of the ordinary.

"It was probably a rib bone that came up," he said. "We thought it was a bent fence post. It was covered in mud."


In the end, it turned out to be part of an extinct creature that roamed these fields thousands of years before they were divvied up into farms, when humans hunted for their meat.

University of Michigan Professor Dan Fisher was interviewed by The News around 4:30 p.m. Thursday while he was knee-deep in mud down in the bottom of a hole, digging out the skull and an enormous tusk.

Plastic bags filled with other remains of the animal that had been collected from the dig sat nearby.

Fisher said the woolly mammoth was probably 40 years old, lived between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago and was hunted by humans who probably killed it, butchered it and stashed it in a pond.

"They did that to store meat and come back to it later," he said.

Fisher added that there have only been 10 similar sites with such a significant portion of a woolly mammoth skeleton found in Michigan in recorded history. There have been more mastodons found, around 300, over the years.

Bristle's farm field off Scio Church Road was filled with townspeople, other local farmers, curious onlookers and Fisher's students. Families also brought their children to look at the one-of-a-kind find as Fisher and the students rushed against daylight to get the skull and tusk lifted from the hole.


Bristle said his family purchased the farm across the road in the 1950s, but he only acquired this land about two months ago. He and a friend were digging to create a lift station for a new natural gas line between Chelsea and Pleasant Lake when they made the discovery, he said.

At first, they weren't quite sure what they had found.

"We knew it was something that was out of the norm," Bristle said. "My grandson came over to look at it, he's 5-years-old, he was speechless."

On Tuesday, he called the university. Fisher came out Wednesday night and by Thursday morning confirmed it was a woolly mammoth from the teeth that were found.

Digging began in earnest Thursday around 9 a.m., with local excavator Jamie Bollinger lending large machinery and his expertise for the job.

"He said he's been digging for 45 years and he's never seen nothing like this," Bristle said.