I remember as a grade schooler walking by a sandpit along the Platte River. In the water of the sandpit, a floating barge had a massive gravel pump that pumped up a slurry of sand, gravel and a few larger rocks to a tall hopper on land. Above the hopper, a series of screens sorted the road-grade gravel from the rocks and sand which were diverted away from the hopper. Occasionally rocks the size of a baseball or larger would bounce off the first screen and tumble down to a rock pile below.
It was this pile of rocks that I wanted to search for specimens for my collection, but this was the first time I had gone there when the pump was in operation. I stood back from the rock pile to avoid getting stoned, literally. Then I saw this tooth come bouncing down from screen onto the pile and the dumb kid in me just had to risk it.
With wary glances upward, when a lull in the rain of rocks occurred, I raced to the tooth, grabbed it, and dashed away. As further large rocks continued to rain down, I decided that that had really been a dumb idea. It was, but I got my petrified mammoth tooth.
#mammoth #tooth #sandpit
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