North Dakota
Coal miners in North Dakota unearth a mammoth tusk buried for thousands of years
BISMARCK, N.D. – The first person to spot it was a shovel operator working the overnight shift, eyeing a glint of white as he scooped up a giant mound of dirt and dropped it into a dump truck.
Later, after the truck driver dumped the load, a dozer driver was ready to flatten the dirt but stopped for a closer look when he, too, spotted that bit of white.
Only then did the miners realize they had unearthed something special: a 7-foot-long mammoth tusk that had been buried for thousands of years.
“We were very fortunate, lucky to find what we found,” said David Straley, an executive of North American Coal, which owns the mine.
The miners unearthed the tusk from an old streambed, about 40 feet (12.1 meters) deep, at the Freedom Mine near Beulah, North Dakota. The 45,000-acre (18,210-hectare) surface mine produces up to 16 million tons (14.5 million metric tons) of lignite coal per year.
After spotting the tusk, the crews stopped digging in the area and called in experts, who estimated it to be 10,000 to 100,000 years old.
Jeff Person, a paleontologist with the North Dakota Geologic Survey, was among those to respond. He expressed surprise that the mammoth tusk hadn’t suffered more damage, considering the massive equipment used at the site.
“It’s miraculous that it came out pretty much unscathed,” Person said.
A subsequent dig at the discovery site found more bones. Person described it as a “trickle of finds,” totaling more than 20 bones, including a shoulder blade, ribs, a tooth and parts of hips, but it’s likely to be the most complete mammoth found in North Dakota, where it’s much more common to dig up an isolated mammoth bone, tooth or piece of a tusk.
“It’s not a lot of bones compared to how many are in the skeleton, but it’s enough that we know that this is all associated, and it’s a lot more than we’ve ever found of one animal together, so that’s really given us some significance,” Person said.
Mammoths once roamed across parts of Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. Specimens have been found throughout the United States and Canada, said Paul Ullmann, a University of North Dakota vertebrate paleontologist.
The mine’s discovery is fairly rare in North Dakota and the region, as many remains of animals alive during the last Ice Age were destroyed by glaciations and movements of ice sheets, Ullmann said.
Other areas have yielded more mammonth remains, such as bonebeds of skeletons in Texas and South Dakota. People even have found frozen carcasses in the permafrost of Canada and Siberia, he said.
Mammoths went extinct about 10,000 years ago in what is now North Dakota, according to the Geologic Survey. They were larger than elephants today and were covered in thick wool. Cave paintings dating back 13,000 years depict mammoths.
Ullmann calls mammoths “media superstars almost as much as dinosaurs,” citing the ”Ice Age” film franchise.
This ivory tusk, weighing more than 50 pounds (22.6 kilograms), is considered fragile. It has been wrapped in plastic as the paleontologists try to control how fast it dehydrates. Too quickly, and the bone could break apart and be destroyed, Person said.
Other bones also have been wrapped in plastic and placed in drawers. The bones will remain in plastic for at least several months until the scientists can figure how to get the water out safely. The paleontologists will identify the mammoth species later, Person said.
The mining company plans to donate the bones to the state for educational purposes.
“Our goal is to give it to the kids,” Straley said.
North Dakota has a landscape primed for bones and fossils, including dinosaurs. Perhaps the best known fossil from the state is that of Dakota, a mummified duckbilled dinosaur with fossilized skin, Ullmann said.
The state’s rich fossil record is largely due to the landscape’s “low-elevation, lush, ecologically productive environments in the past,” Ullmann said.
North Dakota’s location adjacent to the Rocky Mountains puts it in the path of eroding sediments and rivers, which have buried animal remains for 80 million years or more, he said.
“It’s been a perfect scenario that we have really productive environments with a lot of life, but we also had the perfect scenario, geologically, to bury the remains,” Ullmann said.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
North Dakota
North Dakota officials celebrate being among big winners in federal rural health funding
OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Tony Osburn scored 27 points as Omaha beat North Dakota 90-79 on Thursday.
Osburn shot 8 of 12 from the field, including 5 for 8 from 3-point range, and went 6 for 9 from the line for the Mavericks (8-10, 1-2 Summit League). Paul Djobet scored 18 points and added 12 rebounds. Ja’Sean Glover finished with 10 points.
The Fightin’ Hawks (8-11, 2-1) were led by Eli King, who posted 21 points and two steals. Greyson Uelmen added 19 points for North Dakota. Garrett Anderson had 15 points and two steals.
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The Associated Press created this story using technology provided by Data Skrive and data from Sportradar.
MINOT — Minot’s District 3 is home to Reps. Jeff Hoverson and Lori VanWinkle, two of the most controversial members of the Legislature, but maybe not for much longer.
District 3, like all odd-numbered districts in our state, is on the ballot this election cycle, and the House incumbents there
have just drawn two serious challengers.
Tim Mihalick and Blaine DesLauriers, each with a background in banking, have announced campaigns for those House seats. Mihalick is a senior vice president at First Western Bank & Trust and serves on the State Board of Higher Education. DesLauriers is vice chair of the board and senior executive vice president at First International Bank & Trust.
The entry into this race has delighted a lot of traditionally conservative Republicans in North Dakota
Hoverson, who has worked as a Lutheran pastor, has frequently made headlines with his bizarre antics. He was
banned from the Minot International Airport
after he accused a security agent of trying to touch his genitals. He also
objected
to a Hindu religious leader participating in the Legislature’s schedule of multi-denominational invocation leaders and, on his local radio show, seemed to suggest that Muslim cultures that force women to wear burkas
have it right.
Hoeverson has also backed legislation to mandate prayer and the display of the Ten Commandments in schools, and to encourage the end of Supreme Court precedent prohibiting bans on same sex marriage.
Tom Stromme / The Bismarck Tribune
VanWinkle, for her part, went on a rant last year in which she suggested that women struggling with infertility have been cursed by God
(she later claimed her comments, which were documented in a floor speech, were taken out of context)
before taking
a weeklong ski vacation
during the busiest portion of the legislative session (she continued to collect her daily legislative pay while absent). When asked by a constituent why she doesn’t attend regular public forums in Minot during the legislative session,
she said she wasn’t willing to “sacrifice” any more of her personal time.
The incumbents haven’t officially announced their reelection bids, but it’s my practice to treat all incumbents as though they’re running again until we learn otherwise.
In many ways, VanWinkle and Hoverson are emblematic of the ascendant populist, MAGA-aligned faction of the North Dakota Republican Party. They are on the extreme fringe of conservative politics, and openly detest their traditionally conservative leaders. Now they’ve got challengers who are respected members of Minot’s business community, and will no doubt run well-organized and well-funded campaigns.
If the 2026 election is a turning point in the
internecine conflict among North Dakota Republicans
— the battle to see if our state will be governed by traditional conservatives or culture war populists — this primary race in District 3 could well be the hinge on which it turns.
In the 2024 cycle, there was an effort, largely organized by then-Rep. Brandon Prichard, to push far-right challengers against more moderate incumbent Republicans.
It was largely unsuccessful.
Most of the candidates Prichard backed lost, including Prichard himself, who was
defeated in the June primary
by current Rep. Mike Berg, a candidate with a political profile not all that unlike that of Mihalick and DesLauriers.
But these struggles among Republicans are hardly unique to North Dakota, and the populist MAGA faction has done better elsewhere. In South Dakota, for instance, in the 2024 primary,
more than a dozen incumbent Republicans were swept out of office.
Can North Dakota’s normie Republicans avoid that fate? They’ll get another test in 2026, but recruiting strong challengers like Mihalick and DesLauriers is a good sign for them.
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