Claim of mammoth bones draws treasure hunters to NYC river

Circa-2004 illustration of a group of woolly mammoths in a late Pleistocene landscape in northern Spain. Treasure hunters, encouraged by a tip given during a December 2022 episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast, are plumbing the depths of New York City’s East River in search of woolly mammoth tusks and bones that were allegedly dumped there in the 1940s. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, author Mauricio Anton. © 2008 Public Library of Science. Shared under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license.
Circa-2004 illustration of a group of woolly mammoths in a late Pleistocene landscape in northern Spain. Treasure hunters, encouraged by a tip given during a December 2022 episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast, are plumbing the depths of New York City’s East River in search of woolly mammoth tusks and bones that were allegedly dumped there in the 1940s. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, author Mauricio Anton. © 2008 Public Library of Science. Shared under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license.

NEW YORK (AP) – Ask people what you might find buried in the muck at the bottom of New York City’s East River and they’d likely say “mob boss” before thinking of mammoth bones. But several groups of treasure hunters have taken to the waterway in recent weeks after hearing a guest on comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast claim a boxcar’s worth of potentially valuable prehistoric mammoth bones was dumped in the river in the 1940s.

Continue reading