Nowadays, Gary Hoyle lives on an island 6 miles off the coast of Maine, but for almost three decades, he was an exhibit artist and curator of natural history at the Maine State Museum in Augusta. In 1989, he found himself on the prowl for some large Ice Age fossils to complete the museum’s permanent exhibition, “12,000 Years in Maine.” In a classic case of “scope-creep,” his search for an object to put in a glass case morphed into a quest for the only mammoth ever found in Maine.

The bait was the eponymous “mystery tusk.” At first, Hoyle’s attention was directed at the specimen displayed in the entrance of what is now the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine in Orono. It was one of two prehistoric tusks that were once in the collection of the old Portland Museum of Natural History. The other was moldering among a deposit of the former museum’s treasures at the University of Maine in Machias.

LOCAL REVIEW

“Mystery Tusk: Searching for Elephants in the Maine Woods,” by Gary Hoyle. North Country Press, 2022, 268 pages. $23.95

One of these two tusks was said to have been dug up in Scarborough (the other in Alaska), but the museum’s identification labels had long since disappeared. No one knew which was which. Nor was there any indication of when it might have been unearthed. Probably in the 19th century, Hoyle guessed, until a search of the local newspapers revealed that such a tusk had been discovered in Scarborough in 1959. It had duly joined the one already held by the natural history museum. A mix of photography, human memory and chemical analysis soon identified the tusk that had once cleared its path through the snows of Pleistocene Maine.

Hoyle at once put together a team, and a couple of summers of field work at the site added further pieces of the puzzle. The discovery of a diagnostic feature, a seven and a half pound tooth, proved the beast could be nothing other than a mammoth (not a mastodon). The author describes all this with gusto, not least the ingenious custom-designed tools that the inventive crew of the Maine State Museum created on the spot.

Hoyle does a superb forensic job of suggesting the details of how the Maine mammoth met her end and came to lie at the bottom of a pond in Scarborough. At the same time, he gives a good idea what southern Maine might have looked like 13,000 years ago: a windy, grassy steppe at the foot of the retreating Laurentide Ice Sheet.

Meanwhile, a second story had emerged from the press coverage at the time of the original, somewhat unprofessional dig. A letter to the paper put forward a counter theory: The tusk was not prehistoric; rather it had belonged to “Old Bet,” a locally famous circus elephant that had met a tragic end in Alfred in 1816. The yellowed pages of old newspapers and journals proved as enticing to Gary Hoyle as the marine clay of a paleontological dig. And so “Mystery Tusk” becomes two stories for the price of one.

In the early days of the Republic, there were, in fact, two live elephants being separately exhibited around New England. The fame as a curiosity, and resultant profit, of the first led to the importation of a second for similar gain. As with the two tusks, Hoyle identifies which was Old Bet, but not before conducting a fascinating ramble around the early history of traveling Wonders of Nature shows. Among other things, something as large as an elephant had to be transported under cover of night, lest the populace get a sneak peek without paying their admission fee.

Old Bet’s death at the hand of a hot-tempered farmer denied admission to the show in 1816 gives Hoyle the chance to discuss the dreadful impact on Maine farmers of the year without a summer, caused by the explosion of the Tambora volcano 10,000 miles away. Nevertheless, Old Bet’s memory lived on long enough to inspire a young candy-store owner named P.T. Barnum.

The book is well-illustrated, mostly with the author’s own artwork. Hoyle spent his career painting museum dioramas. In fact, his experience goes back even earlier. As a 15-year-old, his talent for making nature scenes came to the attention of the curator of the Maine State Museum, who commissioned him to sculpt two box turtles for display. When he went to work for the museum 13 years later, Hoyle deadpans, an early task was “the removal of two crumbling turtle sculptures from the old museum.”

“Mystery Tusk” is an interesting bit of paleontological history, but some of the mundane detail is superfluous. Also, toggling back and forth between the stories of elephant and mammoth may be a nice idea, but it makes for unnecessary distraction. Still, Hoyle tells a good tale. Two of them, in fact.

Thomas Urquhart is the author of “Up for Grabs, Timber Pirates, Lumber Barons and the Battles Over Maine’s Public Lands.”