State Geologist Edward Murphy regaled attendees of the American Petroleum Institute’s Bakken Chapter’s quarterly meeting in Minot on Thursday in telling about the dig.

Murphy said he was working in Bowman County in 1988 when he received a call about the find, which was discovered when the property owner was working on building a new garage. Unfortunately, by the time Murphy was able to get to the site, the concrete slab for the garage had already been poured and the structure was already built.

“The landowner said he would let us tear out his brand new slab if we put it back in a three week window. This was late August of ’88. At the university, classes were already back and I couldn’t get any professors or anybody to do anything. So that just sat there for all these years,” Murphy said.

Murphy said this missed opportunity was on his mind after a mammoth tusk was found in the Freedom Mine at Beulah a few years ago. Murphy wanted to close the book on the find before he retired. He checked on the property by consulting Google Earth and learned the farmstead and the garage were both still standing and occupied.

This photo shows a collection of woolly mammoth bones recovered in northwestern North Dakota 36 years after their initial discovery.

“The woman that owns it is really nice and was happy to have us up there,” Murphy said. “We got a lot of students up there. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to get kids interested in science. Paleontology is the easiest one.”

Murphy, his team and a group of 90 local students descended on the garage in May 2024 for a test dig, which resulted in three bones and multiple fragments. A subsequent dig in September 2024 uncovered the skull and three drawers of bones. Murphy said additional digs are planned for the spring, but he could be once again thwarted by that concrete slab.

“We’re going to have to take that slab out. We probably have to go down 4 to 8 feet in the garage and backfill. But I’m consumed with how we’re going to get down far enough. That slab doesn’t have one crack in it. I had a hope that the garage would be in such terrible shape they’d want to get it replaced,” Murphy said.