Ken Lessnau's walk in the woods might have yielded an important find of Wisconsin's prehistory.
Lessnau is a wood-carving artist who lives half a block from Goose Lake in Adams County. He said he was walking late last year near his home in an area that was marked with a sign stating "public hunting" when he happened upon a crater-like hole filled with water.
Sticking out of the water, and about two-thirds submerged, was an item that looked to Lessnau like a giant bone.
The rock-like item - measuring about 33 inches long - is likely the mineralized tibia of a juvenile mastodon or mammoth, said archaeologist Constance Arzigian of the Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.
She based her tentative conclusion on photos taken by the Daily Register of the bone, including one depicting Lessnau holding it in his arms.
"It's really cool," she said Monday. "We're thinking it's a tibia, and it could very well be a mastodon or a mammoth."
Mastodons and mammoths were elephant-like mammals that became extinct at the end of the Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago. Both species were known to have lived in what is now Wisconsin, Arzigian said. Mastodons, which tended to eat shrubbery, lived in wooded areas, while mammoths were eaters of small plants and gravitated toward prairies.
Arzigian said the item is too large to be the bone of any mammal currently indigenous to Wisconsin. The calcified appearance of the item, particularly at what appears to be a broken end, suggests that the bone is thousands of years old.
Although many teeth from these creatures have been found in Wisconsin, she said, intact fossilized samples of their bones are relatively rare.
That's why Arzigian said she hopes that Lessnau will find out, definitively, whether the land where the item was found is publicly or privately owned.
There's a possibility, she said, that state paleontologists or archaeologists will want to excavate the area, because there may be more mammoth or mastodon parts there - maybe even a complete or nearly complete skeleton.
Lessnau, 59, said he was born and raised in Racine and moved to the Oxford area in July.
A wood-carver by trade, Lessnau described himself as an artist and a loner.
He said he roams wooded areas or walks railroad tracks and riversides from time to time in search of unusual pieces of wood to carve, or anything else that will get his imagination flowing. One of the things he found on a past walk is a five-leaf clover, which he keeps in his freezer.
"Whatever I can find," he said, "and it'll give me an idea to make something. I'm an artist. You find something weird, and then you make something out of it."
When he first saw the bone-like item, Lessnau said, he thought it was an unusually shaped piece of wood. He said he used a rope to hoist the item, which weighs about 30 pounds, into the bed of his pickup truck.
Lessnau said the walk in the woods took place just before the snow began to fly, and he hasn't been back to the place where he found the item. He'd planned to go back and look for more bones as soon as the ground thaws.
Arzigian said if the item turns out to be the mineralized bone of an extinct prehistoric mammal - and its shape, size and texture make it likely that it is - trained scientists excavating the area would be able to find not only other parts of the animal, but also evidence of where it had roamed, what it might have eaten and how it died.
One of Wisconsin's best-known mastodon finds took place near Boaz in Richland County. The Boaz Mastodon was found in 1897 after a heavy rainfall, when farmers checking for flood damage discovered the bones sticking out of a washed-away creek bank. The skeleton is about two-thirds complete, although the tusks were never found. The Boaz skeleton is housed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Geology Museum.
According Arzigian, one of the most recent discoveries of mammoth remains in Wisconsin took place in Kenosha. In 1991, a team led by archaeologist Dan Joyce, curator of exhibits and collections for the Kenosha Public Museum, used a detailed map, drawn almost 30 years earlier, to locate the spot where a farmer found a mammoth bone, and later some tusk fragments.
The 1990s excavation led not only to an 80 percent-complete mammoth skeleton (and evidence that it was butchered by human hunters), but also the bones of another mammoth that is 90 percent complete, and one of the largest mammoth skeletons ever excavated.
If what Lessnau discovered is indeed a mastodon or mammoth bone, Arzigian said, "this would be a very, very rare find."
Still not knowing exactly what he had, Lessnau took the bone-like item to the Adams-Marquette Veterinary Service clinic on state Highway 82 in Oxford about 10 days ago.
"I go for a walk every noon," said veterinarian Dr. Don Pfund. "I was all bundled up and headed out the back door, and he drove up and said, ‘Are you a veterinarian?'"
Pfund said he was and said Lessnau asked for help identifying the object.
"First time I had ever seen him," Pfund said. "Totally out of the blue."
"I said, ‘It's not out of a chicken,'" he joked. "It's way too big for a horse."
But he said he was positive the object was a bone of some sort, broken at the growth plate, and suggested to Lessnau that it might be from a woolly mammoth.
"The problem wasn't in figuring out if it was a bone or not. The problem was: What bone is it?" he said.
Pfund said he visited an active excavation site, The Mammoth Site in Hot Springs, S.D., last summer with three of his grandchildren. He said he also visited the place about a decade ago. Pfund is semiretired and lives in Iowa but rents a place in Wisconsin Dells for about four months in winter and helps in the clinic.
Lessnau said his attempts to contact officials with the state of Wisconsin, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Milwaukee Public Museum have been in vain so far.
"The curiosity is killing me," he said. "I want to find out what it is."
He said he's shown his find to a few visitors.
"It's a conversation piece," he said.
source....
- Thanks Matt!
