Mammoth Tooth Found In Downtown San Francisco

DevotedSkeptic writes with this excerpt pulled from the San Francisco Chronicle:"A seemingly ordinary day at the Transbay Transit Center construction site became a mammoth day of discovery Monday when a mild-mannered crane operator reached deep into the earth and pulled out a tooth. This was no ordinary tooth. The 10-inch-long brown, black and beige chomper, broken in two and missing a chunk, once belonged to a woolly mammoth, an elephantine creature that roamed the grassy valley that's now San Francisco Bay 10 to 15 thousand years ago in the Pleistocene epoch."

Comments

meet the

[binarylarry]

I hope he held it high in the air and yelled "Yabba dabba dooooooo!"

Re:meet the

[wonkey_monkey]

People from Dubai don't like The Flintstones, but those from Abu Dhabi do.

Re:meet the

[Dogtanian]

I wish I could, but I can't. What's E.T. short for?

Evolutionary reasons- the gravity on his home planet is relatively high.

Re:meet the

[Dogtanian]

(Note; this is a reference to my supposed "homepage" link, which actually points to Slashdot Japan shoved through Google Translate)

Thank you for introducing me to Slashdot Japan in English. With headlines like "Why do you need the growth of the railway children" I know which site I'll be visiting more often.

Yes, I can only assume that Japanese is a language that isn't as simple to auto-translate to English as others. Google Translate does quite a good job on some European languages, but Japanese comes across as quaintly bizarre at best and downright incomprehensible way too often. :-)

Re:meet the

[riT-k0MA]

Normal people don't read slashdot.

Hey Barney!

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"A seemingly ordinary day at the Transbay Transit Center construction site became a mammoth day of discovery Monday when a mild-mannered crane operator reached deep into the earth and pulled out a tooth.

He proceeded to shout in a peculiar dialect and then slide barefoot down the spine of his crane to the bedrock below. Excited about this new discovery... or maybe it was that it was quittin time, he sang a catchy little tune and pushed his car home. According to legend, he had ribs for dinner.

Pleistocene was a paradise

[Spy Handler]

There was no SF Bay when that mammoth was walking around. Evil humans hadn't begun changing the climate and melting glaciers yet, so the sea level was at its optimum. SF and NY were hundreds of miles inland, so real estate prices were affordable. Chicago was under several kilometers of ice, thank goodness.

All in all, a wonderful time.

Re:Pleistocene was a paradise

[517714]

Well of course the mammoth wasn't native to the bay area, the tooth was "brown, black and beige," obviously it was British.

if we can't get jurrasic park

[circletimessquare]

can we at least get pleistocene park?

you will be the coolest bastard since pt barnum and have instant historical fame

there's got to be some internet bazillionaire who doesn't want to fly into space, but really wants a f**cking wooly mammoth in his back yard

ok then. get it done!

the gobs of dna we have from many specimens, some elephant zygote blanked out, and an elephant surrogate mother... i mean we're on the cusp of this happening, aren't we?

Re:if we can't get jurrasic park

[circletimessquare]

cave bears!

irish elk!

wooly rhinos!

giant ground sloths!

sabretooth motherfucknig tigers!

damn man, for real, let's do this already you rich bastards

Re:if we can't get jurrasic park

[NoMaster]

can we at least get pleistocene park?

We can't even manage Holocene Park properly - the dominant animal at the top of the food chain runs rampant, destroying everything in its sight, and is starting to escape its confines and invade neighbouring locations - and you want to start on Pleistocene Park?

Re:if we can't get jurrasic park

[SternisheFan]

Oh man, have you never seen Jurassic Park? They're probably extinct for good reason. Maybe they didn't play well with others, whatever the reason, Mother Nature told 'em to get out of the gene pool. She's got a pretty great record, so far, when it comes to knowing which species should advance and which should be tar-pit food. But we could all have nice warm coats...

Re:if we can't get jurrasic park

[Dogtanian]

can we at least get pleistocene park?

Well, these dinosaurs are obviously from the, er, Plasticine era. ;-)

Re:if we can't get jurrasic park

[couchslug]

"there's got to be some internet bazillionaire who doesn't want to fly into space, but really wants a f**cking wooly mammoth in his back yard"

He can marry my mother-in-law instead.

Tooth Fairy

[Delarth799]

Wonder how much Ill get for putting this big ol tooth under the pillow

Re:Stop work! NOT

[ukemike]

Sadly for the Transit Authority, all work will have to be stopped and archeologists will have to be called in. I expect this project will lose at least two years in construction time.

From TFA
"Excavation work in the area was halted while the find was examined, but Allen said that because of the depth of the discovery, it's unsafe and unrealistic to send someone down to inspect the site, so digging was allowed to continue. "

Still Playing Catchup to LA

[rgmoore]

That's nice, but they've got a long way to go to compete with the La Brea Tar Pits. When they were building a new parking site for the LA County Museum, they found an almost complete mammoth skeleton, not just one tooth. That and a whole bunch of other incredibly cool fossils. One more reason to prefer Southern California.