What To Do With A Woolly Mammoth Tusk?

There's nothing like a summer in Alaska ... balmy weather, long sunlit days ... and that brings out the fun seekers, tourists and treasure hunters from the "lower 48." (OK, there's nothing like a winter in Alaska either ... frigid weather, short moonlit days ... and that's what sends all the visitor folks back to where they're from)

"A long, long time ago;" Don McLean wrote a song tribute to Buddy Holly and how rock and roll music had changed since his death. Alas, nobody ever wrote about how the world has changed since the death of the Woolly Mammoth; at least nobody ever wrote a tribute song about the Woolly Mammoth. Oh yeah, Henry Mancini came close with The Baby Elephant Walk, but somehow, it falls way short of a tribute piece.

So there I was, miles from nowhere, camping out on the frozen tundra ... well technically permafrost, but frozen tundra sounds so much more manly. I don't know how I could have slept so soundly if I had known that a mammuthus primigenius had actually roamed the same ground where I camped feeding on grasses, sedges and shrubs, exactly what I had for dinner the night before. The permafrost, or permanently frozen earth, is found in the extreme northern climates. As I searched the muddy terrain in the hot summer day, I noticed something strange peeking through the ground. The warmth, coupled with shoreline water erosion and my eagle eyes created the opportunity to discover an in tact fossil ... a huge Woolly Mammoth ivory tusk. I struggled for appropriate words. "Veni vidi, vici," but alas, it had been said already by Julius Caeser in 47 BC. How about, "We came, we saw, we kicked its ass!" Hackneyed, trite and used in Ghostbusters.

I found it ... it's mine! Perfect! And I can also use it when I bring the tusk home to my wife.

And the story has a happy ending. She let me keep it. White ivory is now banned, although that isn't keeping the poachers from killing both elephants and the rangers sent to protect the elephants. Fossil ivory, with its variety of colors derived from minerals in the surrounding earth is a beautiful alternative to the banned white ivory, and it is perfectly legal to own it. The ban on new ivory warranted the effort of digging into the hard frozen ground (remember ... permafrost) to recover the fossil material.

And the rest is history. The tusk has been transformed into many works of art, each of them uniquely different with a scrimshaw etching creating individual masterpieces. Examples of that scrimshaw are shown in the photos below. If you are the least bit interested in purchasing one for yourself or to learn a little more about scrimshaw, please virtually transport yourself to One Of A Kind Scrimshaw Works Of Art