A Florida toddler recently made the news for stumbling onto the kind of discovery that likely would have thrilled Amherst Professor Frederick Brewster Loomis: a mammoth tooth, found in the same general area where Loomis found a Columbian mammoth skeleton, the inspiration for Amherst’s trunked and tusked mascot.
Florida Today reports: “Monte Brigance, a retired offshore electrician from Livingston, Texas, was baby-sitting his grandson Colt Couch, [age 3] during the unexpected discovery in southeast Palm Bay.”
“‘He was throwing rocks into the pond. That's his favorite thing to do: throw rocks in the pond that he picks up out of the bank. About half of this was sticking out of the soil, and he couldn't pull it up,’ Brigance said, holding the mammoth tooth.”
Brigance helped his grandson pull up the object, which was later confirmed as a mammoth tooth.
Melbourne, Florida’s Crane Creek is host to deposits rich in prehistoric bones, in an an area known as the “Melbourne Bone Bed.” In was here where Loomis (Amherst Class of 1896 and a biology and geology professor) and James Gidley of the Smithsonian Institution unearthed the two complete mammoth skeletons, one being the one that now resides in Amherst’s Beneski Museum of Natural History.