Marine biologists expect to find all sorts of strange stuff in the deep sea, but a mammoth tusk ain’t one of them.

Back on shore, the team was able to confirm the tusk as belonging to an extinct Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi).

“In the deep sea, we find lots of amazing animals which people would not believe exist on Earth, but finding this mammoth tusk, so deep and so far from shore, was by far the most improbable thing I’ve experienced,” Haddock wrote to me in an email.

The exquisite preservation of the as-yet-undated mammoth tusk was made possible by the cold, high-pressure environment of the deep ocean, which is “different from almost anything we have seen elsewhere,” Daniel Fisher, a University of Michigan paleontologist and a member of the investigating team, explained in the press release.

It’s hard to know exactly how the mammoth tusk ended up so far from shore, but scientists have seen this sort of thing before.

It’s hard to know exactly how the mammoth tusk ended up so far from shore