Lot 501
Yukon Territory Large Woolly Mammoth Tusk, (Mammuthus Primigenius), Devensian Period, 110,000-12,000 years ago
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“It’s a quirk of geology and geography that the Yukon is home to a bounty of both gold and ancient fossils, and in the Klondike the two worlds—mining and fossil research—are intricately bound. At one time, a vast swath of the Canadian North was part of Beringia, an ancient land bridge that connected North America and Asia during Earth’s most recent ice age. And with the climate too dry for glaciers to form, it became home not just to prehistoric horses and bears, but also sabre-toothed cats, mammoths and even camels.
The key to uncovering Yukon’s fossil treasures has been the process used by the mining industry to find gold in the Klondike. Gold is trapped in bedrock under a thick, muddy substance called loess which has formed over millennia and can be as deep as 24 m in some places. To reach bedrock, miners must blast away the muck with high-powered water jets, exposing the perfectly preserved fossils.”
- Matthew Allen, Maclean’s Magazine, July 24, 2015