RYE — A local fisherman landed a mammoth catch this week — literally.


Mike Anderson was fishing for scallops on the F/V Rimrack out of Rye Harbor on Tuesday. When he winched up the scallop dredge that trawls behind the boat to catch the bottom-feeding mollusk, he noticed something strange mixed in with the scallop shells and rocks.


For a fisherman who says he has discovered whale vertebrae, porpoise skulls, an old fuel tank that he thought was a treasure chest, and even the body of a drowned kayaker, it says something that he described this 6-inch-long, triangular, hard and grooved rock-like object as the weirdest thing he's ever found while fishing.

Shane Nicols, who works on the Rimrack with Anderson, was immediately on his phone looking for an expert who could shed light on the mysterious find. He found one in Will Clyde, an associate professor of geology, who appeared to have an answer.

"It looks like you may have pulled up a fossil mammoth tooth! Mammoth and mastodon bones have been dragged up before in the area between the Seacoast and the Isles of Shoals, so it is certainly a possibility," he wrote to Nicols in an e-mail.

Mammoths and their distant relatives, mastodons, went extinct thousands of years ago, and popularly are best known for their curved tusks and long hair. In an e-mail to the Portsmouth Herald, Clyde said mammoth and mastodon finds are "pretty spotty" in this part of the world, and fossils are more commonly found in the western and southern parts of the country.

He said that while he believed what Anderson found was a tooth, he would have to look at it more closely to confirm. Unfortunately, Clyde is currently in Argentina on sabbatical until June.

Anderson said he pulled the object up from water 120 feet deep about 8 miles south of Rye Harbor. Clyde said fossils found between the Isles of Shoals and the Seacoast are probably from sediments that were laid down at the end of the last ice age, between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago. The sea level was significantly lower at the time due to the rebound of the crust when the glaciers began melting back, he said, releasing the land from beneath the weight of the ice.

Anderson said he is not sure what he plans to do with the find. The consummate fisherman, he is already thinking about an even bigger catch next time.

"I want to get a tusk. That would be something," he said.