Erich Parpart had seen nothing like it. Was it a mammoth tusk? A bone... maybe from a Tyrannosaurus rex?! It was found before Christmas (2014) by the McHenry County Conservation District maintenance worker, while walking in a field in the 3000+ acre Kishwaukee Corridor near Marengo. It has been identified as an incisor tooth from the lower jaw of a giant beaver. The giant beaver, Castoroides ohioensis, went extinct around 13000 years ago. The whole story is in the Northwest Herald.
Parpart, a Wonder Lake resident who has been with the conservation district about a year, knew it wasn’t a cow bone. He was raised on a farm outside Madison, Wisconsin, and grew up digging cow bones out of fields. His guess was a tooth or tusk.
“It was large and had sweeping curve that didn’t look like it would fit on anything that’s around today,” he said.
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.”
