WINSTON, Ore. — On April 11, Jeremiah Longbrake had to get rid of some excess energy.
The 9-year-old had just gotten to his grandmother’s house in a far west area of Winston, near Tenmile, and started his afternoon playing in the backyard.
He bounced on the trampoline, swung on the swing hanging from a large tree and headed down to the small creek that runs through his grandmother’s property.
Looking down at the water, he noticed a small object — he thought it was a plastic container of some sort — and reached with a stick to try to push it out of the creek.
After retrieving the object, which was dark brown, the size of two fists and featuring distinctive grooves running through the “rock,” he brought it inside to his mother, Megan Johnson.
“He brought it up here and I thought it was a piece of petrified wood or something,” Johnson said. “Then I got to looking at it more and it just looked odd.”
Johnson decided to post it on Facebook — she has an enthusiasm for rocks, and has “rockhounding” friends in her circle — to see if they could help identifying it.
“I figured I’d throw it out there to see if anybody had any ideas,” Johnson said. “And a half a day later, 12, 13 people were commenting on there, ‘That looks like a tooth.’”
After reaching out to archeologists and anthropologists across the state, Johnson finally found her answer after being referred to the Museum of Natural and Cultural history in Eugene. Pat O’Grady, a staff archeologist at the museum, replied excitedly to share the news: Jeremiah had just found a fragment of a tooth from a mammoth.
“Everybody thought it was fake,” Jeremiah said when asked about the reactions from his friends at school. “It felt very interesting and exciting.”
Mammoths went extinct in Oregon approximately 10,000 years ago, and their teeth can be identified through their signature banded appearance, which come from the enamel, interspersed with dentin.
“I was just shocked,” said Rhonda Johnson, Jeremiah’s grandmother who has lived on the property for 31 years. “But it was exciting.”
The tooth could have come from anywhere, but likely broke off of the banks of the small creek upstream and made its way to the backyard where Jeremiah saw it. Megan Johnson said that Jeremiah’s always looking for something unique in the outdoors, so if anybody was going to find it, it was going to be him.
“We’re always out and about looking around,” Megan Johnson said. “He’s got the eye.”
Jeremiah doesn’t know what he’s going to do with the tooth just yet. O’Grady, at the museum, requested a dime-sized sample to be used as a specimen for testing purposes at the museum’s collection. Jeremiah hopes to send a piece big enough for testing, but after that, he’s not sure whether he’ll keep it as a memento or donate it to a local museum.
Megan Johnson grew up in the same house as a child, playing in the same backyard, and exploring the same creek where Jeremiah found the tooth fragment. She’s happy that her children are able to make their own discoveries in that same little creek west of Winston.
“It’s an absolute blessing,” Johnson said. “They get to experience the same magic that I experienced when I was a kid. This is where my fascination with rocks started, but to have my son find something way, way, infinitely cooler than the little white rocks I used to pick up, it’s definitely, definitely awesome.”
