Fossil hunter spots 450,000-year-old mammoth tusk while at quarry: 'Sticking out like a sore thumb'

A fossil hunter found a 450,000-year-old mammoth tusk while on a recent visit to a local quarry. 

Jamie Jordan, 33, was at a quarry in Cambridgeshire, near Peterborough, England, roughly 75 miles north of London, when he spotted something notable in the rubble. 

The four-foot-long mammoth tusk was "sticking out like a sore thumb," he told SWNS.

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"I could not believe my eyes," Jordan recalled of the moment, as SWNS, the British news service, reported.

The tusk is believed to belong to a steppe mammoth from before the last ice age.

"The mammoth itself would have looked like a much bigger version of a modern-day elephant — up to 13 feet tall, and weighing 14 tons," noted the Peterborough Telegraph.

Jordan, who reportedly found his first fossil when he was a boy of just four years old, said he'd never spotted a full mammoth tusk before — he said they're normally broken into pieces when quarried. 

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"It was just on top of the ground. It was very heavy to pick up," he said, as SWNS reported. 

This particular type of mammoth is believed to have lived in herds. 

Jordan told Fox News Digital in an email on Saturday, "It’s now a mammoth task to preserve the tusk for generations to come. It will take about six months to fully preserve."

After finding the rare tusk, Jordan said the fossil was taken to Jamie’s Fossils Galore, a nonprofit paleontology museum, for preservation and examination. 

The preservation process includes ensuring the tusk is kept wet to prevent it from damage, according to SWNS. 

"We will be spending the next few months working to preserve the tusk — it can take up to six months to do that," said Jordan. 

From there, the team at Fossils Galore will examine the tusk to find out more about the mammoth’s life, such as its habitat and food supply. 

"We will also look for signs of predation — whether from early humans or other animals," Jordan said. 

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The museum runs activities over the summer for families to learn more about paleontology — ultimately hoping to lure in more paleontologists in the future. 

The staff at Fossils Galore are also working on analyzing a skeleton they found in Surrey in 2017 — an iguanodon dinosaur that lived more than 100 million years ago. 

In 2008, they also discovered a nearly complete skeleton of a plesiosaur, according to reporting by the Good News Network.

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On its website, Fossils Galore explains that Jamie Jordan first founded it in 2003 as a website — a place where Jordan could "share his fossil knowledge" with others.

By 2006, Jordan began running fossil hunting trips "so he could take members of the public to safe areas and show them how to find fossils."

Then, "with an ever-growing collection, [he] also decided to start taking some of his fossils into schools to teach children all about what lies beneath our feet," the website also notes.

‘Eroded patriotism’: Teen shares why he now won’t follow in father’s footsteps as military recruiting lags

Aden Gilbert grew up watching war movies, fighting enemy combatants in video games and listening to his dad's Marine Corps stories. He considered following in his father's footsteps but changed his mind as he saw the country and its leadership heading in a direction antithetical to his values.

"If we're prioritizing being woke, and we can't actually protect the majority of American people . . . what's the point of having a military?" Gilbert asked Fox News. "Is it really worth joining and putting our life on the line for ideologies that we don't agree with and that we don't want to necessarily protect?" 

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Military children have historically been more likely to serve their country than their peers. Ten years ago, more than a quarter of new recruits had a parent who had served, and around 80% reported having at least one family member who had done so, according to a Pentagon survey.

"It was something that a man of honor would do, to serve and protect his country and serve and protect those values that existed back then," Gilbert, 18, said. "But I think things are a little bit different now."

The military is struggling to fill its ranks as young people like Gilbert forgo service. The Marine Corps and Space Force are the only branches that anticipate meeting their enlistment goals this year. The Army, Navy and Air Force expect to fall a combined 26,000 enlistees short in fiscal year 2023. The Army also fell short in 2022 by about 15,000 soldiers (25% of its goal).

Military officials have pinned much of the blame for lackluster recruitment numbers on a competitive job market and a dwindling pool of qualified applicants. Only 9% of young Americans are interested in serving their country, according to the Department of Defense.

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Gilbert said the military is alienating the very men and women who are most likely to serve by emphasizing progressive ideologies over readiness. A recent Navy recruiting pitch featured a drag queen, and last year the branch released a video stressing the importance of pronouns.

"I would rather tiptoe around literal landmines than have to tiptoe around people's pronouns," Gilbert said.

Gilbert has always considered himself a patriot, but said the left has "successfully eroded patriotism" by pushing restrictive laws, "woke" ideology and "celebrating satanic themes in music and Hollywood."

"It just angers me seeing our president as the conductor of that symphony of sewage," he added.

Jason Gilbert, Aden's dad, said he never pushed his children in one direction or another when it came to enlisting. But he wasn't surprised when his son changed his mind about joining.

"I could see he was a little bit demoralized about the direction the country was going," said the elder Gilbert, who founded the Disabled Veterans PAC and helps former service members run for office.

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"When we hear the word ‘pride,’ we're now programed to instinctively think of the rainbow flag, whereas the generations before me, when they heard the word ‘pride,’ they thought of the American flag," the younger Gilbert said. "And now to the left, that's considered offensive."

He said he's "not moved to serve a commander in chief who seems to value the rainbow flag over the American flag" and "labels white supremacy and climate change as the top national security threats in our country, yet never once has denounced Marxism."

Army Secretary Christine Wormuth acknowledged last month that there was "no doubt" that the perception that the military has gone "woke" is exacerbating recruiting woes.

"We are a ready Army, not a ‘woke’ Army," Wormuth told reporters in June.

But the branch's top civilian leader blamed the problem on rhetoric rather than military policies.

Financial incentives to join the military hold less sway, too. Fewer students are pursuing higher education, making the GI Bill less appealing to him, and he started his own social media marketing business during his senior year of high school.

"Until the values sent forward by the president, that the military is tasked to defend, revert back to the core values that our founders and the past generations died for . . . I'm just going to stick with my decision to decline military service to instead run my business," Gilbert said.

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