A local visitor to the O2 Ranch believed he came across something special while hunting on the property in West Texas. But ranch manager Will Juett took some convincing. After researchers from Sul Ross State University (SRSU) descended on the historic property, Juett realized the discovery was indeed something special: It was an extremely rare mammoth tusk.
“I was skeptical when a deer hunter showed me a picture of what he thought was a fossil,” Juett said in a university announcement. “I figured it was likely just an old stump.”
The investigation began soon after Juett contacted Bryon Schroeder, a longtime acquaintance and director of SRSU’s Center for Big Bend Studies (CBBS). Along with CBBS archeologist Erika Blecha and a few other colleagues, Schroeder’s team traveled to O2 Ranch to examine the object found sticking out the ground in a creekbed’s drainage area.
“We realized pretty quickly there was not more to the skeleton, just an isolated tusk that had been separated from the rest of the remains,” Schroeder explained.
Researchers worked over two days to create a protective cast around the tusk for transport. After covering the fossil in plaster-soaked burlap strips, Schroeder’s group then constructed a frame around the ranch discovery before hauling it to SRSU for further analysis.
Although multiple mammoth and mastodon species existed across modern North America until roughly 12,000 years ago, few of the elephant relatives ever migrated into West Texas. According to Schroeder, only a single mammoth tusk excavated from the Trans-Pecos region has ever been carbon-dated—and that happened over 60 years ago. Even then, the process at the time was far less accurate than dating methods used today that can narrow down an age range to within 500 years. Schroeder believes a more precise estimate for the O2 Ranch tusk should be completed within the next few months.
It’s too early to determine the exact mammoth species just yet. But as Gizmodo noted, the tusk possibly belonged to a Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi), one of the only species documented in Texas. The Columbian mammoth was a distant cousin of the more recognizable woolly mammoth, but could still grow to around 13 feet tall while weighing around 10 tons. The reasons behind their eventual extinction remain debatable, but they likely died out due to a combination of factors including climate change and human hunting. It’s a bit poetic, then, that hunting is what led humans back to one of these megafauna in 2025.
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