Grant Keddie was walking along a Saanich beach with a local newspaper reporter who was researching mammoth fossils when he looked up a towering sea cliff and thought, “That doesn’t look like a piece of wood.”
Keddie, who is the Royal B.C. Museum’s curator of archeology, dropped his pack and told the Victoria News reporter he’d be back in a minute.
“I ran up the cliff and I got to the top and I yelled down to her, ‘It’s a mammoth tusk!’ She thought it was an April Fool’s joke or something,” Keddie laughed Monday.
“It was kind of neat. After talking about other people’s finds and knowing where they should be and not ever finding one myself my first impression was that it was about time.”
Keddie had searched the cliffs at Island View beach for years and had finally struck buried archeological treasure.
“It’s been sitting there for 17,000 years waiting for me,” Keddie said. “I wrapped it in plastic bags and then wrapped it in my jacket and carried it out. I got a bunch of bubble pack and wrapped it around it.”
It’s only the fourth piece of mammoth tusk in the museum’s collection that includes bits of teeth and bone.
Keddie’s tusk is as long as an adult’s forearm and has a circumference just wider than a fist. A whole tusk would be more than two metres long.
It was found 20 metres from the top of the cliffs and about six storeys up from the beach below. It’s a valuable and rare find.
“The more pieces of the puzzle, the more we can reconstruct what was going on here in the past,” Keddie said.
Keddie said the cliffs represent over 60,000 years of history and are made up of fine sands and gravel dumped in the area by advancing glaciers.
“It’s these gravels that have covered up the mammoth bones. They are now eroding away and slowly we are getting mammoth teeth and tusks and bones,” he said.
In the last 100 years muskox, mammoth and mastodon fossils have been found in the area.
“The majority of the mammoth fossils from the whole province that we have in our museum collection are from the Saanich peninsula area,” he said.
“The assumption is there were lots of these lying around - recently dead animals - that got covered up and now they are eroding out.” Descended from Indian elephants, mammoths last roamed B.C. about 17,000 years ago and were killed off by the ice age.
As for Keddie, his treasure hunt is not over. “I still plan to go find the rest of it and when I retire I will be finding more,” he said.
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