LIVE OAK COUNTY, Texas — It's been some 12-thousand years since the Columbian Mammoth roamed across the coastal bend. Recently Live Oak County resident Gipper Nelson spotted the fossilized remains of one such mammoth while kayaking on the Nueces River.
Avid outdoorsman, Nelson considers himself an amateur archaeologist. It was the mammoth's tooth that caught his eye.
"Always looking you just never know," Nelson said. "I think there [are] still more molars because the skull piece is still here and if you really got after it and someone wanted to do a true dig I think you'd find a whole animal."
Nelson says he spends a good part of each day exploring up and down the river. He never thought his passion for finding old relics would turn into what could end up being an archeological dig.
He found the tooth just above the water's edge buried in the river clay. The fossilized molar easily dwarfed Nelson's hand.
This distant ancestor of the Asian elephant reached 14 feet - or 3 meters - at the shoulder, and ranged across what is now the continental United States.
Smaller than Wooly mammoths, the Columbian mammoth actually cohabitated with early humans in North America.
Although they have long since gone extinct, Gipper Nelson proves we can still find their traces to this day.
Nelson plans on continuing to dig around the site to see if the rest of the mammoth might be there.
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