SCORE: AK Family Finds Two Woolly Mammoth Tusks in Same Spot, 22 Years Apart

Clash DailyAugust 15, 2014

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Wow. What a find. I wonder if they’ll trade it for a couple of my Whitetail shoulder mounts? Check it out.

Andrew Harrelson still has a few foggy memories of the day his parents came home with a woolly mammoth tusk strapped to the back of a four-wheeler.

“This big, old log-looking thing,” recalled Harrelson, who was about 3 years old at the time, growing up in the Norton Sound village of White Mountain. “I had no clue what it was until they told me.”

Andrew knew it must be important. His mother, Luann Harrelson, had spotted the 79-pound fossil that day in the gritty, strange-smelling muck of Fish River and posed her son for a Polaroid beside it.

That was 1992.

On Sunday, Andrew made a discovery of his own at precisely the same river bend just two miles outside the village.

Peppered across northern Alaska, tusks of the extinct species range in age from 12,000 to 400,000 years old and advertise for as much as $75 per pound on the resale market. Here is how a mother and son each made the discovery of a lifetime, 20 years and 10 feet apart.

Read more: Alaska Dispatch News