The Red Rogers cruiser made its way up the East River in Manhattan last month, stopping at a spot facing the riverbank. A fossil collector and a treasure hunter on board plunged into the icy waters.
They were drawn there by a very popular podcast: “The Joe Rogan Experience”. In a recent interview on that show, a guest from Alaska presented an explosive story: There are tens of thousands of priceless woolly mammoth tusks lying in the riverbed.
“I’m going to start a bone fever,” said the guest, John Reeves, a fossil collector and gambusino.
“A bone fever?” Rogan asked.
“Yes, sir,” he replied. “We’ll see if anyone out there has a sense of adventure.”
The answer came quickly. The podcast episode, which aired on December 30, was an instant sensation. Several teams came to New York for the chance to find artifacts that could be worth thousands of dollars.
Jake Koehler, a 31-year-old underwater treasure hunter known on his YouTube channel as Scuba Jake, came from his home in Georgia. “What a story to tell your family and be a topic of conversation at dinner.”
The search would be complicated; Navigating the breakneck currents of the East River, packed with water traffic, is a challenge for even the most experienced divers, particularly during the winter when water temperatures plummet.
“Very strong currents go through there,” said Rick Cochrane, a diver with his own YouTube channel, DigDiveDiscover, who traveled with Koehler. “It’s just dangerous.”
But an examination of the evidence Reeves relied on to make his claim raised questions about how many bones might be involved. Reeves described it as “a train car” of bones and tusks that had been sent to the American Museum of Natural History around 1940, but were instead dumped in the river because, in his account, the museum was not interested. in them.
The story begins eons ago, when mammoths roamed the earth. At the end of the 19th century, the gold rush swept through Alaska, leading to the discovery of countless bones, fossils, intact skeletons, and even mummified prehistoric remains preserved in permafrost.
Around 1917, excavations of prehistoric remains began in various locations, including Alaska. Young university students looking for work and adventure came to help.
One of these was Richard H. Osborne, who worked on what became known as the “bone wagon” in Alaska in the early 1940s, when he and others unearthed some 250,000 specimens that were shipped to the New York museum. (They are used for research and are not open to the public.)
Osborne subsequently studied paleontology and genetics. Around the year 2000, at age 80, he wrote an article that he hoped to turn into a book about his adventures.
He never wrote the book and the article was not published. Osborne died in 2005. But now, a thought lost in the manuscript about a shipment in the early 1940s that never made it to the museum has gained new life. Two co-authors of Osborne’s paper cast doubt on the bone dumping. One of them, Robert L. Evander, a former paleontologist at the museum, called the idea “implausible.”
And in a statement, Scott Rohan, a museum spokesman, said: “We have no record of the disposition of these fossils in the East River.”
The men who showed up to dive in New York harbored no apparent skepticism. And so, on January 7, the Red Rogers moved up the East River. When the boat arrived at the site, Don Gann’s dive team from the Discovery Channel’s Sewer Divers was already there.
Koehler and Cochrane waited until the tide was out, when the currents would be weaker, and at about 4:00 p.m. they jumped into the water. Each diver carried a powerful flashlight down to the riverbed, which was revealed to be an epic field of debris. Concrete blocks, rebar, tires—even bicycles and a car.
As the cold worsened, divers hastily combed through the debris and found nothing resembling a tusk, but some promising fragments, which they picked up.
The crews returned home to sift their specimens. It was weeks before Cochrane posted an update on YouTube: “None of them are really bone,” he said.
But the story’s appeal remained nonetheless. The young college student in Alaska, his theory about the river, the podcast —what if?
“The bones could still be there,” he told viewers.
By: MICHAEL WILSON
BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/27/nyregion/joe-rogan-mammoth-tusks-east-river.html, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-02-09 23:00: 07
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