MCCD worker finds prehistoric giant beaver tooth outside Marengo
The McHenry County Conservation District maintenance worker was out with a crew not long before Christmas, walking through a field in the nearly 3,000-acre Kishwaukee Corridor near Marengo and looking for concrete foundations of long-gone buildings.
Parpart’s unexpected discovery sat in the maintenance shop for a few days, everyone taking a stab at guessing what it could be. A tusk – maybe from a mammoth? A Tyrannosaurus rex bone? A cow bone?
Eventually, it made its way to the Illinois State Museum where JJ Saunders, a curator and chairman of the museum’s geology department, identified it as a fossilized giant beaver incisor, a prehistoric beaver that was about 8 feet long from tail to snout.
The incisor likely came from the right side of the beaver’s lower jaw, Saunders said in a news release.
“The giant beaver was the largest Pleistocene rodent in North America,” Saunders said. “It was an animal the size of a black bear inhabiting lakes and ponds bordered by swamps. We know from its teeth that the giant beaver did not fell trees, and thus did not construct dams to modify stream courses.”
What a beautiful find! You can’t help but think that this AP story and the bogus Arizona AP story of the giant beaver got merged in some key folks minds. I’m still getting headlines of GIANT BEAVER found as joggers watched in awe. A beaver the size of a bear is giant. This tusk makes me think of that old beaver family crest from Germany, which we always thought of as more artistic than correct. Now I realize it’s no more wrong than our cartoons of their huge top buck teeth, and given this discovery, actually fairly representative.
Is it just me? Or is this medieval crest beautiful?
