Five foot mammoth tusk found by Seattle workers

The curved tusk of a mammoth, an ancient elephant relative that inhabited North America at least 10,000 years ago during the Ice Age that was found by workers digging in a Seattle neighborhood was lifted out of building site on Friday.

Seattle's Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture said its paleontologists were confident that the fossil, uncovered on Tuesday, came from an Ice Age mammoth.

Crews were excavating for plumbing trenches in the city's bustling South Lake Union neighborhood when they found the tusk about 40 feet (12 metres) beneath ground level, according to Jeff Estep, president of Transit Plumbing Inc, the subcontracting company involved in the dig.

Scott Koppelman of AMLI Residential, the real estate company in charge of the development project, said Friday's lift went well.

Five feet (1.5 metres) of the husk was discovered on Tuesday, and since then more of it has been uncovered, Burke museum officials said.

The Ice Age typically refers to the Pleistocene epoch, which began about 1.6 million years ago and ended about 11,000 years ago.

The mammoth that had the tusk appears to have lived between 16,000 and 60,000 years ago, which is the tail end of the Pleistocene epoch, museum officials said.

Mammoths, which were closely related to elephants, grew up to 12 feet (3.7 metres) at the shoulder and had a pair of long tusks that curved down from the face and upward at their ends.

They arrived in North America from Asia about 2 million years ago, according to the museum. They became extinct as the glaciers receded at the end of the Ice Age, the museum said.