Thousands of years ago, the two mammoths died, locked in battle on the high plains of Nebraska, when their tusks became intertwined. Now, after months of preparation in a Lincoln museum, the tangled fossils are about to return to western Nebraska.

BY ALGIS J. LAUKAITIS | Lincoln Journal Star

About 20,000 years ago, two http://www.journalstar.com/media/flash_news/mammoth.swf%20',%20'privacy',%20'width=470,%20height=380,%20scrollbars,%20resizable=no')"> bull mammoths in a hormonal rage clashed and locked their tusks in what turned out to be a battle to the death on the high plains of northwest Nebraska.

No one knows how long the beasts fought.

It may have been hours — or  days. Most likely they were fighting over a female.

What is known is that each mammoth was about the same size. Each had a long and short tusk. During the fight, one suffered a deep shoulder gash. The other lost an eye. And one may have died first, leaving the other trying to free itself from an elephant-size corpse.

He never did.

Exhausted or done in by injuries, the mammoth joined his dead foe on the ground. Scavengers ate their flesh, leaving two knobby heads with their tusks intertwined. The skeletons were buried under sediment cascading off the Little Badland formations north of Crawford.

In the summer of 1962, a couple of men running a power line to a cattle tank on the Tom Moody ranch saw something round, like a human skull, sticking out of a bank.

“It was a big chunk of bone,” said Michael  Voorhies,  a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Voorhies was a  21-year-old geology student back then, working at a nearby museum for the summer.

The two men brought the fossil in a feed sack, he recalled. When he saw it, he decided to investigate.

Rancher Moody brought in a backhoe and, after removing about eight feet of dirt, they saw parts of a head, tooth and the tip of a tusk. The rounded skull-like object in the feed sack turned out to be the top of a femur.

Voorhies’ first thought: The mammoth had broken a tusk. But after several days of digging, he found more tusks. Voorhies and his teenage crew weren’t too excited. Mammoth fossils were fairly common in Nebraska.

“Our boss was not interested in us collecting a lot of mammoths,” Voorhies said. “They take up a lot of room.”

But when they saw the heads and the intertwined tusks, Voorhies decided his boss, Dr. C. Bertrand Shultz, then director of the University of Nebraska State Museum, might want to know about it.

He guessed correctly.

“Before we did any real damage, Schultz sent out an experienced collector,”  Voorhies said.

Ivan Burr, the museum’s chief collector, and the crew coated the heads and tusks with “gallons” of shellac and covered them in burlap and plaster for shipment back to the University of Nebraska State Museum in Lincoln.

The fossils are still there, 43 years later, sitting on the original wood support structure Burr built.

But that’s about the change.

Voorhies and his staff are preparing the fossils so they can be shipped back to the Crawford area next spring.

They will be part of a new exhibit at the Trailside Museum of Natural History at Fort Robinson State Park.

“The fossil will be displayed exactly the way it was found,” Voorhies said.

It will be next to a standing skeleton of one of the original mammoths already at the museum.

The display will have a dual purpose. Visitors will see how fossils are uncovered, and researchers will have easier access to world-class fossils for study.

Back in Lincoln, Gregory Brown Rob Skolnick and Ellen Stepleton have spent months removing the plaster and burlap covering and layers of protective shellac from the fossils.

“Elephant ivory, even if it’s been out in weather, will crack and peel away like onion skin,” Voorhies said.   

Paleontologists no longer use shellac. They have better methods. But Voorhies and his staff must remove every trace of the stuff to get it ready for display.

Using saws, they cut away pieces of the hard shell, much like a doctor removes a cast. They then brush on an alcohol and acetone solution and let it soak in before applying an absorbent material.

Many unanswered questions remain about the two Columbian mammoths and how they died.

Voorhies believes the mammoths, each about 40 years old, were evenly matched in size — a factor that led to the death grip. Also, the unusual combination of a long and short tusk allowed the long tusks to become intertwined.

The hardest part of getting the fossils ready for shipment is keeping the heads and tusks stable. Brown said the bones are fairly soft, and not mineralized or hardened like most fossils.

“We want the things to look good but we also want to do as little damage as possible,” Voorhies said.

The 65-year-old Voorhies is glad the fossils he first saw decades ago will go on display for everyone to enjoy.

“It’s more impressive now to me than when I was a kid,” he said. “Fossils just aren’t supposed to occur like this. You’re supposed to find beat-up pieces of junk.”

Reach Algis J. Laukaitis at 473-7243 or alaukaitis@journalstar.com.