Ice age mammoth being unearthed at WA dig site — tours now available

McBones Coyote Canyon Mammoth Site is undergoing the painstaking process of unearthing the remains of a prehistoric mammoth in eastern Washington, with tickets for spring and early summer tours now available to watch the process live.

The Coyote Canyon Mammoth research dig site contains the remains of a Colombian mammoth, likely killed in an Ice Age flood approximately 17,000 years ago.

“It’s a close relative to woolies, but woolies are built for the cold, and you find them where it was really, really cold,” Gary Kleinknecht, the education director for the McBones Coyote Canyon Mammoth Site, said on “The Jake and Spike Show.” “You find Colombian [mammoths] along the west coast of North America all the way down into Mexico and Central America. We’re kind of far north, actually, for Colombians.”

How did this discovery happen?

The discovery of this mammoth first occurred in 1999, when the owner of the property, who primarily sold dirt, was digging into the hillside with a front-end loader.

“Somebody told him he had mammoth bones in his dirt, so he poked around and found a upside down, huge jaw with a tooth or two in it,” Kleinknecht said. “He took a picture of it and then gave it away. Sometime later, this fellow’s wife circulated that picture around, and it got into the hands of the guy who is now our research director, Bax Barton.”

By 2008, a nonprofit was formed, and then the process of digging up the mammoth began.

The research team believes the mammoth being unearthed is a male, roughly 40 years old when it died.

“What are kids and families going to see when they come to the museum?” KIRO host Spike O’Neill asked.

“We start out with a slide show, kind of give them some background, and we show you around our little museum area we’ve got right there in the building, our bone lab,” Kleinknecht said. “And we show people that it’s where we clean and preserve the bones, then we take them down into the canyon where the Mammoth is, and show them the area where we dig.”

Some tours occur while the team is actively working. More information can be found at the McBones Coyote Canyon Mammoth Site’s website.

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

Listen to “The Jake and Spike Show” weekdays from noon to 3 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.