An anatomy professor from Plymouth State University rediscovered fossilized evidence of woolly mammoths roaming New England, ten years after throwing away a similar fossil.

Professor Fred Prince was fly fishing a decade ago when a unique object drew his attention. He picked it up, examined the curious structure and laminated sheen of the rock before discarding it.

“I threw it away, I just dropped it back into the gravel,” said Prince in a statement. “It was ten years after the fact when I realized what I had done.”

Over this past winter, Prince became interested in woolly mammoths, and would unwind after work with a few beers and reading up on habits and anatomy of the ancient pachyderm. In January, Prince acquired a molar and partial molar from a Dutch acquaintance; the teeth samples were dredged from the Black Sea and reminded Prince of a fly fishing trip from a decade prior.

“As soon as I put that partial molar in my hand I was back ten years ago beside that stream,” said Prince. “I felt sick knowing what I tossed aside.”

Prince then decided to lead an expedition in search for another woolly mammoth tooth, and spent the remainder of the winter mapping and pinpointing specific sites. Then, after the snow melted, Prince visited three sites on a southward-facing slope of a gravel pit (Artist re-enactment).

“I told my wife, ‘I’m going to go look for a mammoth molar,’ and I found this in a decades-old gravel pit; it was the third place I looked,” said Prince. “It was embedded into the surface of the ground, and I could see those contours on top.”

The find is the first officially recorded evidence of woolly mammoths in New Hampshire, and the fourth of New England. In 1848 a tooth and a tusk were excavated in Vermont; in 1959 a partial skeleton was found during railroad construction in Maine; and in 2013 a tooth dredged from the sea near the Isles of Shoals.

“I wouldn’t doubt there are people who have picked up something like this and did the same thing I did 10 years ago,” said Prince in a Plymouth State University article. “I think people have assumed some were here in New England, but there isn’t much evidence, in part due to the acidity of our soil.”

Another factor that hampers paleontology in the New England region is the geology of the region. The Appalachian Mountains over the past 480 million years. Therefore mountainous regions are not conducive to archaeology when compared with the areas with vast plains that have millions of years worth of flat sedimentary rock neatly accumulated. Such rare discoveries are important to increasing the understanding of prehistoric ecology in such mountainous regions.