Several groups of treasure hunters have been seen on the East River in New York City after a guest on the Joe Rogan podcast claimed a boxcar of valuable prehistoric mammoth bones was dumped in the river in the 1940s.
Despite a lack of evidence, treasure seekers have used boats, diving gear and remote-operated cameras to search.
“I think the chances are just as good as the lottery. And people buy those tickets every day,” said Don Gann, 35, of North Arlington, New Jersey, a commercial diver who has been out on the water since early last week, with his brother and two workers.
It all started when John Reeves, an Alaskan gold miner with a passion for fossils, appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience on 30 December to talk about his land, where he has uncovered bones and tusks and where, in the early 20th century, digging for gold unearthed prehistoric mammal remains.
Some of that material was brought to New York, to be given to the American Museum of Natural History. Reeves cited a draft of a report by three men, including one who worked at the museum, that included a reference to some fossils and bones deemed unsuitable for the museum being dumped in the river.
“I’m going to start a bone rush,” Reeves told Rogan, before reading from the draft and giving out a location: FDR Drive, at around 65th Street.
“We’ll see if anybody out there’s got a sense of adventure,” he said, adding: “Let me tell you something about mammoth bones, mammoth tusks – they’re extremely valuable.”
The American Museum of Natural History said: “We do not have any record of the disposal of these fossils in the East River, nor have we been able to find any record of this report in the museum’s archives or other scientific sources.”
Reached by phone, Reeves told a reporter to read the draft he posted on social media. Those pages identify as the authors Richard Osborne, an anthropologist; Robert Evander, who worked in the museum paleontology department; and Robert Sattler, an archeologist with a consortium of Alaska Native tribes.
Sattler said the story about the dumped bones came from Osborne, who died in 2005. The document cited by Reeves was real, he said, and written in the mid-1990s. But it wasn’t intended for an academic journal. It was a starting point for something, maybe a book, based on Osborne’s knowledge of a period in Alaska when mammoth remains were discovered.
Sattler said Osborne spent time around the operation as a young man and probably heard the story about surplus bones being dumped in the New York river.
Mammoth remains discovered in Alaska did wind up at the American Museum of Natural History, including some still on display.
But the section of the Manhattan shoreline where Reeves claimed the bones were dumped underwent major changes in the 1930s and 1940s, as the East River Drive, later named for Franklin D Roosevelt, was constructed on fill and pilings. The highway opened in 1942, raising questions about how someone would have dumped a huge trove of bones without disrupting traffic.
Gann said he had seen about two dozen other sets of fossil hunters out searching for mammoth remains. Visibility in the East River is extremely poor, he said. On a good day, you can see maybe a foot. The current at the bottom is strong.
Gann, who appeared in Discovery’s Sewer Divers, added: “I’ve hunted for weird artifacts my entire life, so this one, it just kind of fits into my repertoire.”
He and his crew hadn’t found anything and had switched to a location off southern Brooklyn, perhaps a more likely site for cargo to be dumped.
“If I find nothing, then I find nothing,” Gann said. “I gave it an honest shot.”