Dive Brief:

• A neighborhood near Amazon's headquarters in a Seattle has been a hive of construction activity for years, but that slowed down in one spot after a worker for a plumbing contractor uncovered what turned out to be a tusk from an ancient relative of the elephant.
• Jeff Estep, who owns Transit Plumbing, said his worker had an idea of what he might have found, though Estep said his first reaction was, "Yeah. Right."
• The Columbian mammoth is Washington state's official fossil, and the creatures roamed the area about 10,000 years before Amazon and Starbucks came to the city.

Dive Insight:

It's unclear what the find may mean for the project for which Transit was hired. The Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Washington is going to display the tusk, but paleontologists are hoping the property owner will let them do some more digging on the site – and not for pipes.