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Mastodon Ivory

Mastodons were a prehistoric elephant that lived between 20,000 and 1,000,000 years ago. Mastodon ivory is "fossil ivory" from the mastodon's tusk.

Blast from the far past. In the Yukon Territory of northern Canada and Alaska there are many active gold mines even to this day. Placer gold mining is digging in the gravel in river and creek valleys to reach the gold. The gold is usually located at the bottom of such areas just above the bedrock. During the process of digging through the dirt and gravel in the far north, the miners often find themselves having to dig through permafrost sometimes a hundred or more feet thick. This permafrost has been frozen for many thousands of years.

Thousands of years ago the north of Canada and Alaska was covered mostly by ice. In places over a thousand feet thick. Gradually this ice melted and animals from the south moved north and across the land bridge from Russia to take advantage of the wealth of vegetation, which replaced the ice. This melting of ice was not as peaceful as it sounds. Many disastrous events occurred from ice breaking of the face of the thousand food glaciers and from volcanoes erupting under the ice.

Some of the animals that inhabited this region during that time were giant elk, saber tooth tigers and mastodons. Some times these animals were caught in some of the more violent events that were common at that time. Animals were buried alive in great ice and mudslides. These areas then froze with the animals trapped inside and remain frozen to this day, in the form of permafrost.

Today, the miners of the Yukon and Alaska find these animals in the frozen ground as they dig for gold. Usually they just find skeletons or scattered bones. This is when they find the tusks of the extinct mastodons and mammoths. Surprisingly enough, although the official name for this ivory is "fossil ivory", these tusks are not fossilized at all. They have been frozen in nature's deep freeze for all this time. In the area of Dawson City, Yukon the bones found are said to be in the neighborhood of 30,000 years old.

This ivory is available for purchase, if you know who to talk to. I managed to procure 2 sections of this valuable ivory during my time living in the Yukon. I now use it to make beautiful jewelry and other small carvings.

So, how rare is mastodon ivory? As you can tell from the description above, mastodon ivory is quite literally rarer than gold!

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Mastodon Ivory