A mammoth story: How the FBI helped Canada get back a pair of tusks
OTTAWA — It was a late July afternoon when Kieran Shepherd got a call from the Canadian embassy in Washington with a message: The FBI had something pretty old that they wanted to give him.
What they wanted to give Shepherd, curator of paleobiology at the Canadian Museum of Nature, were a pair of mammoth tusks taken from Canada more than 50 years ago.
Their path home is the most unusual Shepherd has seen in his 30 years at the national museum and involves a massive FBI investigation, an infamous American collector, the RCMP and diplomats on both sides of the border.
“Most of the material we have our scientists have collected, so it’s pretty rare to have a repatriation,” Shepherd said Thursday at the museum’s fossil collections centre in Gatineau, Que.