CAROLINA BEACH, N.C. — We’re always hearing stories about people finding neat things washed up on the beaches along the Carolina coast, and this one does not disappoint.
A woman told WWAY she recently found several fossils from a woolly mammoth that are likely thousands of years old on Carolina Beach.
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Becky Wood said she spends most mornings on the beachcombing through the sand for fossils and shells.
"One morning I saw this in the edge of the water, and I thought it was fossilized wood," she told WWAY.
After she went home and posted a photo of her findings online, she learned it was something much more interesting.
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“They told me it was part of a mammoth tooth,” Wood said.
Woolly mammoths were large, hairy animals with long tusks that roamed the Earth during the Ice Age. While it’s hard to say exactly how old the fossils are, experts like Patti Mason said they are likely more than 10,000 years old.
"Mammoths disappeared from the East Coast quite a bit before the West Coast," Mason told WWAY. "Some evidence indicates mammoths were around Alaska as little as 7,600 years ago."
“I thought it was pretty awesome that we can find fossils from the Ice Age out here,” Wood said.
Mason said the fossils were probably swept onto the beach by recent storms.