ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (WSVN) — Two teachers made a rare Florida find when they discovered a piece of history that’s thousands of years old. It was a jaw-dropping discovery with the teachers unearthing the jaws and tusks of a species long extinct.
You can hear the screams of excitement through their scuba masks. They couldn’t believe their eyes after they just uncovered one of their best finds yet.
“All of a sudden, we’re just kind of swimming around, and wave my hand like this, and the silt reveals just the two teeth completely whole sitting right there in front of us,” said Rick Cochrane.
The jaw of a mastodon, and not far away, two tusks, at least 10,000 years old.
“I heard screaming. I heard hooting and hollering. I look over to the side, and there’s Rick with these two massive teeth,” said Henry Sadler.
Sadler and Cochrane are both teachers and frequent dive partners on the weekends.
“These tusks are, unfortunately, really fragile. You can see where they are peeling apart here,” Cochrane said.
They made the discovery while diving in St. Petersburg waters on private property.
The mastodon is similar to a woolly mammoth.
As Cochrane explained, finding tusks like these in such great condition is nearly unheard of.
“Sometimes you can have things that literally will turn to dust right before your eyes and things that can be very hard,” Cochrane said. “This was somewhere in the middle, so we got really lucky with it. Even the tusks, ivory doesn’t fossilize well. The ivory tusks you see from woolly mammoths and stuff, they tend to come from Siberia or the permafrost, not so much our Florida rivers, and so when we find them, they’re very fragile, very hard to get out.”
It’s why they used zip-ties to help keep it intact.
The tusks are now being stabilized, which means they’re using chemicals to make sure they’ll be preserved for years to come.
As for the teeth, they’ll need to wait a few more weeks for them to fully dry out before they can begin the stabilization process.
“We really pride ourselves on giving the kids opportunities they wouldn’t find anywhere else,” Sadler said.
Once the fossils are stabilized, Sadler and Cochrane plan to display it in the classroom, giving students an up close look at history dating back more than 10,000 years.
“We use that as a hook to bring them into science and talk about other things around fossils,” Cochrane said.
The teachers are planning their next dive in the same area very soon.
They are confident there are more fossils waiting to be found.
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