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The
fossilized teeth of a 10-million-year-old tapir found in Homer.
Photo by Ned Rozell.
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Thanks to her six-year-old
grandson, Janet Klein of Homer recently hosted a few interesting
house guests.
Five experts on ancient
creatures slept in Klein's Homer house last month as they searched
local cliffs for another chunk of a mammal that lived in Alaska
millions of years ago. Her guests were Patrick Druckenmiller of
the UA Museum of the North, Grant Zazula and Susan Hewitson of the
Yukon government, paleontologist Analia Forasiepi of Argentina,
and Ross MacPhee, curator of mammology at the American Museum of
Natural History in New York.
Along with Klein, a Homer
resident and naturalist, the scientists were looking for a rock
that might fit into the petrified jawbone of a tapir Klein's grandson
Kai found about a year ago on a beach near Homer.
Kai Reising, then 5,
was beachcombing in July 2017 with his grandmother; his mother,
Deborah Klein; his father George Reising; and his younger brother
Silas. In an area where the family had found cool things on other
outings, Kai picked up a rock with both hands.
"Kai went over thinking
it was a big piece of fossilized wood," Klein said. "When he turned
it over, his mom said, 'It has teeth!'
"The minute we saw the
teeth, we knew a scientist had to look at it."
Klein has a trained eye
for unusual rocks; years ago, she found fragments of a mammoth tusk
and ankle bone on the Kenai Peninsula. She didn't know what the
tapir was, but she knew it wasn't a contemporary of the mammoth,
which survived until perhaps 10,000 years ago.
"I knew it had nothing
to do with a Pleistocene animal," she said.
The family carried the
rock from the beach. Soon after, Janet Klein visited Druckenmiller
and UAF paleontologist Kevin May in Sutton, where they were doing
work. They were jazzed at the pearl green teeth protruding from
the rock.
"Those are just super
diagnostic," Druckenmiller said.
"They suggested it was
rhino-like," Klein said. "By the time he got back up (to Fairbanks),
Patrick was pretty sure it was a tapir."
Druckenmiller thinks
this Alaska tapir was alive about 10 million years ago. Related
to rhinos, horses and zebras, tapirs live today in Central and South
America, as well as the swamps of Malaysia and Sumatra. They are
the size of a state fair hog and look like pigs with trunks. Their
noses and upper lips extend to allow tapirs to grip vegetation.
Their design has endured.
"The tapir has not changed
a lot," Druckenmiller said. "Its teeth have been the same for 50
million years. They've figured it out and have stuck to it."
Alaskans have many times
seen the imprint of tropical leaves in rocks and sequoia stumps
that suggest rich prehistoric ecosystems existed here. Until now,
no one had found fossilized remains of the mammals that roamed those
warm forests millions of years ago.
"It's an incredibly rare
find at least we think it is," said Druckenmiller, who enjoys
when major discoveries come walking through the door or land in
his email inbox. "Any day can be Christmas: You just never know
no, it's a little rarer than Christmas."
He will soon wrap the
jaw up and place it in an Action Packer. He will carry it through
security at Fairbanks International Airport and tote it to New York
City. There, at the American Museum of Natural History, he will
hand the jaw over to specialists who will clean the specimen and
expose more of the tapir's features.
"It could be a new species,"
Druckenmiller said. "But we'll let (Ross MacPhee, of the American
Museum of Natural History) tell that story.
As for the recent search
of the tapir beach with the other experts, Druckenmiller and his
colleagues did not find any more parts. But Janet Klein vows to
search that stretch of coast at least every six weeks.
"Maybe someday we'll
get lucky and find some more of it," Druckenmiller said. "A lot
of the major finds in paleontology are not made by paleontologists."
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