Biology class finds mammoth tusks

LINCOLN, Ill., Oct. 4 (UPI) -- A Lincoln (Ill.) College biology student was trying to feel catfish with his feet when he felt something else in the creek -- a prehistoric mammoth tusk.

"There weren't any knots in it and it was curving -- I just had a feeling about it," Judd McCullum told the Peoria (Ill.) Journal Star. "When it was wet, there was almost no mistaking what it was."

By the time McCullum, his classmates and instructor G. Dennis Campbell were done last week, they had an almost complete mammoth tusk and part of another.

Campbell said McCullum's adrenalin must have been high since the first water-soaked section he pulled from the creek weighed about 150 pounds.

Jeffrey Saunders, an Illinois State Museum curator, said the tusks probably belong to one of two elephant relatives -- the wooly and Jefferson's mammoths -- that lived in the state 13,000 to 40,000 years ago.