'Good dog!' Puppy digs up 13,000-year-old artifact in backyard
One Washington state puppy is being hailed as a very good dog for his historic find.
Scout, an 8-month-old male yellow lab, did what dogs do and dug a hole in his family's Whidbey Island backyard.
But it's what the dog found he found that's the reason he's making headlines.
“I noticed he was carrying something around in his mouth,” owner Kirk Lacewell .
Like most owners, Lacewell thought his dog picked up a piece of wood or a rock.
But Lacewell said Scout was still carrying around the item the following day.
“On the second day, it made me think, 'This is odd, I wonder what’s going on with this,'” said Lacewell.
He said he wondered what might've been special about what he thought was a rock.
After taking the item off of Scout, he cleaned it and determined it looked different than other rocks.
“Part of it looked like bone. It looked like bone that had a covering over it and it was partly worn off,” Lacewell said.
After sending pictures to experts at the University of Washington’s Burke Museum, it was determined that the item was a woolly mammoth tooth.
The tooth is about 13,000 years old.
“I can’t remember a time when a dog helped uncover a fossil,” museum spokeswoman Andrea Godinez said.
Other mammoth teeth and bones have been found on the island.
“Quite a few mammoth teeth and some bones have been found on Whidbey, which is largely composed of Ice Age sediments,” Elizabeth A. Nesbitt, curator of paleontology at Burke Museum, .
“Nice find,” Nesbitt said. “Good dog!”
Mammoths once lived in what now is Whidbey Island, which is about 30 miles from Seattle.
The tooth will remain with Scout and Lacewell, but will sit on a mantle in the living room, where Scout can't reach it.
“We can just look out there and imagine a woolly mammoth,” Lacewell said.