(October 16, 2008)-- A fossil mammoth tooth discovered on the Bolivar Peninsula after Hurricane Ike stormed ashore has been returned to its owner, an elephant expert whose beach home was destroyed by the hurricane.
Roy Davis evacuated his Bolivar Peninsula home two days before Ike slammed the Texas coast on Sept. 13 and is now living in a travel trailer in Houston.
Davis told The Associated Press that among the items scattered out of his one-bedroom house were about 30 prized animal keepsakes from his years working at zoos.
Two treasured elephant teeth have now been returned to Davis, after AP's original story in early October about what appeared to be an unusual fossil find on the beach.
Davis says he lived a couple of doors down from Lamar University educator Dorothy Sisk, whose house in the community of Caplen also was destroyed by Ike.
Sisk and a Lamar colleague, paleontologist Jim Westgate, went to the area a few days after Ike to see what was left of her home and came upon a 6-pound tooth believed to be from a Columbian mammoth, common to North America until around 10,000 years ago.
Westgate recognized the football-size fossil, Lamar University put out a news release about the find and AP did the story.
Afterward, Davis said a friend who called him, was reading the story, and asked if that fossil belonged to Davis.
Davis said: "It sure could be."
Davis got the mammoth fossil from a construction site in Tyler, when he worked at the Caldwell Zoo in the 1980s.
Later, a KHOU-TV reporter who went to Caplen to do a story on the original find came upon another big tooth on the beach and gave it to another of Davis’ neighbors.
That was an African elephant tooth that Davis had since he earlier worked at the Oklahoma City Zoo and was from an elephant named Timboo that died in the 1970s.
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