People Are Pulling Some Real Weird-Ass Shit Out of Rivers These Days

Happy Sunday. I’m pleased to inform you that people have been pulling some really weird things out of rivers.
In late April, the Fish and Wildlife Service caught—and swiftly released—a 240-pound, 6-foot-10-inch fish in the Detroit River. The female sturgeon is estimated to be more than a century old. “She likely hatched in the Detroit River around 1920 when Detroit became the 4th largest city in America,” the Alpena Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office wrote in a Facebook post about the catch.

Around the same time in Florida (why is it always Florida?), two scuba-diving amateur paleontologists discovered a 50-pound mammoth bone in the Peace River. They donated the bone to a local middle school, Fox News reports. 

“Like astronomy, it’s time traveling. It plays with the imagination so you go ‘wow, what was going on at this time?’”
Florida men discover a mammoth bone, estimated to be 100,000 years old! The story on #FOX35 tonight at 10:45! pic.twitter.com/ylFetQJahB
— Lara Greenberg FOX 35 (@LaraGreenbergTV) May 1, 2021

In related news, anthropology students and their professor at the University of Tennesee at Chattanooga recently found bits of what they believe could be the USS Chattanooga, a Civil War-era boat, in the Tennessee River. “It’s a stark reminder of a period that is not unlike one that we are going through now, and that we are bitterly divided,” UTC anthropology professor Morgan Smith told the local news. “And there are a lot of lessons in that.”