When you’re out in the wilds of Maine, it’s not hard to imagine what the land looked like tens of thousands of years ago, before humans showed up — when panthers stalked the forests, fearsome short-faced bears chased down prey and even possibly massive ground sloths roamed the Ice Age landscape.
We don’t have a fossil record in Maine that proves that such creatures were once here. That’s because the state was subject to hundreds of millions of years of erosion, followed by more than two million years of glaciers scouring the surface, destroying most fossils younger than 360 million years and older than 1 million. There probably were dinosaurs, saber-tooth cats and giant beavers in Maine — but we’ll likely never be completely positive.
But naturalist and artist Gary Hoyle did manage to help prove that at least one famous species of extinct Ice Age megafauna was present in Maine at one point: the wooly mammoth.
Hoyle was a nature-obsessed kid. When he was growing up in Gardiner, he found the first documented example of an albino frog in Maine. At age 18, his turtle sculptures — which he still carves today — went on display at the Maine State Museum in Augusta. That turned into a career, first with the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and then for nearly 30 years as natural history curator at the Maine State Museum.
“I think I’ve been that kind of person since I was a kid,” Hoyle said. “I’ve always been the kind of person that would poke through the dirt and dig into the mud to find interesting things.”
He was at the Maine State Museum in 1989 when he first heard of two mysterious old tusks, which the director of the museum wanted to put on display. One of the tusks was on display outside the office of Harold Borns, the renowned glacial geologist at the University of Maine. The other one — which was broken in half — was languishing in a crate at the University of Maine at Presque Isle.
Both tusks were originally part of the collection of the Portland Society of Natural History, a museum that for more than a century held thousands of fossils, taxidermied animals and other materials. When the museum closed in 1970, its collection was scattered, and the two tusks went to the University of Maine, in Orono and Presque Isle.
Hoyle said that at the time, they knew that one of the tusks was from wooly mammoth remains found in Alaska, and the other was a tusk from a find in Scarborough in 1959, when a local farmer dug it up out of a clay bed while using an excavator on his property.
“We just didn’t know which was which,” Borns said. “Was the tusk that went to Harold Borns’ office the one from Maine? Or was it the one in the crate in Presque Isle?”
There also remained the persistent rumor that Scarborough tusk was from a famous elephant called Old Bet. Old Bet was supposedly the first elephant ever brought to the United States, owned by Hachaliah Bailey, who founded one of the earliest circuses in the country and who was a role model for P.T. Barnum. While Old Bet was on tour through Maine in 1816, a local farmer in the town of Alfred shot her, claiming that it was wrong for an animal to be treated so well when other people were starving during the infamous “Year Without a Summer.”
A Portland Press Herald reporter claimed at the time that the tusk was discovered in 1959 in Scarborough — just a few miles down the road from Alfred, where Bet was shot — and that it might belong to the famous elephant.
“Years later I was giving a talk, and a man came up to me and said he was the reporter that wrote that story, and admitted that he had added that in to make it more exciting,” Hoyle said.
Hoyle managed to track down William Littlejohn, who originally made the 1959 discovery and confirmed that his tusk was the broken one in Presque Isle. He also mentioned that he’d found rib bones, as well as shells alongside the tusk in the clay.
“If there were shells alongside the tusk, deep in the clay, that indicated that it was from a much earlier era,” Hoyle said. “That also meant there might be parts of the remains still in there.”
Hoyle still needed to figure out if the tusk belonged to a mammoth or a mastodon. The best way to do that would be to excavate the Scarborough site. So, he decided to learn how to run an archaeological dig from the best in the business — Jack Horner, the dinosaur paleontologist who became famous for his work on the “Jurassic Park” movies.
Hoyle joined one of Horner’s digs in Montana for three weeks in 1992, and returned to Maine ready to do his own dig in Scarborough. In summer 1993, he and some colleagues and volunteers excavated the site, and found pieces of vertebrae and jawbone that included a molar that definitively proved that their tusk belonged to a female mammoth — not a mastodon.
Furthermore, it was a mammoth that likely died sometime between 10,500 and 13,000 years ago, during the end of the last Ice Age, when receding glaciers revealed grassy steppes along what is now the coast of Maine. Hoyle believes the animal died near the ocean and was swept out to sea, before washing back onto the clay-rich shores of the mouth of what is now called the Nonesuch River in Scarborough.
It’s still the only positively identified Ice Age mammal bone ever found in Maine. While the tusk itself had to be cut into parts in order for radiocarbon dating to be done, it remains in the collection of the Maine State Museum, and a replica cast of the tusk is still on display there, in an exhibit Hoyle himself designed.
