By LAUREN L. DILLARD
Of the News-Register

Former McMinnville Police Sgt. Mike Full has been playing with bones since he was 12. So it was a special treat for him Friday when a team of archeologists gathered to recover part of a Columbia mammoth's upper jawbone from a longtime dig site of his on the South Yamhill River.

Ignoring the sound of planes taking off and landing at the adjacent McMinnville Airport, the team carefully uncovered and removed a 34,200-year-old section of maxilla - including one food-grinding molar still in place.

Full has been finding pieces of the massive prehistoric animal for years. To date, his finds include a complete tusk and both shoulder blades.

This time, Oregon Public Broadcasting was there to watch. The duo of producer Vince Patton and videographer Michael Bendixen got up close and personal with crews as the piece was excavated.

Dr. Alison Stenger, director of the Institute for Archeological Studies, led a team of four from the Oregon Archeological Society in the excavation. They have been devoting Fridays and Saturdays to the project for six weeks now.

They have to remove surrounding material at a maddeningly slow pace to preserve specimens.

"It's always two centimeters into the bank," explained volunteer Lisa Ripps, referring to the metric equivalent of three-quarters of an inch.

Ripps and Mark Fitzsimons used gloved hands to dig trenches around the outline of the embedded bone. They used 6-inch-long sticks as probes to determine where bone ended and compacted sand began.

Their hope is that remnants of soft tissue remain in the tooth socket and will yield DNA. So they wore hairnets to avoid contaminating the dig site with any of their own.

Stenger plans to send any soft-tissue remnants to a lab in Denmark for testing. She said any DNA they yield could provide insights not only about the mammoth, but also about other animals in the area and likely local vegetation.

She requested from a veterinarian some sturdy vials for the samples she intended to collect. The vials were sanitized in an autoclave in preparation.

Crews are sometimes able to collect hair and skin samples from such remains as well. That would be a decided bonus.

Ripps and Stenger estimated the fossil to weigh 30 to 40 pounds as they lifted it out.

Ripps said it was like working on a tree root that needs to come out. Fitzsimons worked on one side as she worked on the other, being as gentle as possible.

Nearby, another team unearthed the femur or large leg bone of a giant bison while their colleagues worked on the jawbone from the mammoth.

Volunteer Richard Burt also reported, "We found some teeth here that belong to a camel." He said camel remains have been found previously in only one place in Oregon - John Day.

Burt said finds like that sometimes ending up rewriting history. "That's part of what this field is all about," he said.

OPB's Oregon Field Guide program, produced by Patton, plans to air an episode on the excavation later in the season. The schedule has yet to be firmed up.

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