This photo released by Lamar University shows Jim Westgate, a trained paleontologist and a research associate with the Vertebrate Paleontology Laboratory at the University of Texas Memorial Museum, posing in Beaumont,Texas, Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2008, with a fossil tooth of a mammoth that he found in Caplen, Texas, in the debris from Hurricane Ike. Westgate believes the fossil discovered in the Ike-damaged debris is from a Columbian mammoth. (AP Photo/Lamar University, Brian Sattler)

Dorothy Sisk and Jim Westgate discovered the fossil tooth in the front yard of Sisk’s home in Caplen, Texas, on the devastated Bolivar Peninsula. If the fossil is from a Columbian mammoth, then it is evidence of the species which was common in North America until around 10,000 years ago. It is expected to be sent to the Texas Memorial Museum in Austin.

More than 1 million people fled the Texas coast because of Hurricane Ike, according to the Associated Press.