BISMARCK, N.D. — The first person to spot it was a shovel operator working the overnight shift, eyeing a glint of white as he scooped up a giant mound of dirt and dropped it into a dump truck.

Later, after the truck driver dumped the load, a dozer driver was ready to flatten the dirt but stopped for a closer look when he, too, spotted that bit of white.

Only then did the miners realize they had unearthed something special: a 7-foot-long mammoth tusk that had been buried for thousands of years.

“We were very fortunate, lucky to find what we found,” said David Straley, an executive of North American Coal, which owns the mine.

The miners unearthed the tusk from an old streambed, about 40 feet deep, at the Freedom Mine near Beulah, North Dakota. The 45,000-acre surface mine produces up to 16 million tons of lignite coal per year.

After spotting the tusk, the crews stopped digging in the area and called in experts, who estimated it to be 10,000 to 100,000 years old.

Jeff Person, a paleontologist with the North Dakota Geologic Survey, was among those to respond. He expressed surprise that the mammoth tusk hadn’t suffered more damage, considering the massive equipment used at the site.

“It’s miraculous that it came out pretty much unscathed,” Person said.

A subsequent dig at the discovery site found more bones. Person described it as a “trickle of finds,” totaling more than 20 bones, including a shoulder blade, ribs, a tooth and parts of hips, but it’s likely to be the most complete mammoth found in North Dakota, where it’s much more common to dig up an isolated mammoth bone, tooth or piece of a tusk.

“It’s not a lot of bones compared to how many are in the skeleton, but it’s enough that we know that this is all associated, and it’s a lot more than we’ve ever found of one animal together, so that’s really given us some significance,” Person said.

Mammoths once roamed across parts of Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. Specimens have been found throughout the United States and Canada, said Paul Ullmann, a University of North Dakota vertebrate paleontologist.

The mine’s discovery is fairly rare in North Dakota and the region, as many remains of animals alive during the last Ice Age were destroyed by glaciations and movements of ice sheets, Ullmann said.

Other areas have yielded more mammoth remains, such as bonebeds of skeletons in Texas and South Dakota. People even have found frozen carcasses in the permafrost of Canada and Siberia, he said.

Mammoths went extinct about 10,000 years ago in what is now North Dakota, according to the Geologic Survey. They were larger than elephants today and were covered in thick wool. Cave paintings dating back 13,000 years depict mammoths.

Ullmann calls mammoths “media superstars almost as much as dinosaurs,” citing the ”Ice Age” film franchise.

North Dakota Geologic Survey Paleontologist Jeff Person sits behind a 7-foot mammoth tusk at the Geologic Survey office in Bismarck. (AP Photo/Jack Dura)

This ivory tusk, weighing more than 50 pounds, is considered fragile. It has been wrapped in plastic as the paleontologists try to control how fast it dehydrates. Too quickly, and the bone could break apart and be destroyed, Person said.

Other bones also have been wrapped in plastic and placed in drawers. The bones will remain in plastic for at least several months until the scientists can figure how to get the water out safely. The paleontologists will identify the mammoth species later, Person said.

The mining company plans to donate the bones to the state for educational purposes.

“Our goal is to give it to the kids,” Straley said.

North Dakota has a landscape primed for bones and fossils, including dinosaurs. Perhaps the best known fossil from the state is that of Dakota, a mummified duckbilled dinosaur with fossilized skin, Ullmann said.

The state’s rich fossil record is largely due to the landscape’s “low-elevation, lush, ecologically productive environments in the past,” Ullmann said.

North Dakota’s location adjacent to the Rocky Mountains puts it in the path of eroding sediments and rivers, which have buried animal remains for 80 million years or more, he said.

“It’s been a perfect scenario that we have really productive environments with a lot of life, but we also had the perfect scenario, geologically, to bury the remains,” Ullmann said.

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Martín Maldonado has a strong reputation for working with pitching staffs.

The Chicago White Sox signed the 37-year-old catcher to a one-year deal Tuesday, a source confirmed to the Tribune.

Terms have not been disclosed. According to the New York Post and MLB Network’s Jon Heyman, who first reported the signing, the deal includes an option year.

Maldonado has a career .207/.282/.349 slash line with 111 home runs and 361 RBIs in 1,118 games during 13 seasons with the Milwaukee Brewers (2011-16), Los Angeles Angels (2017-18), Houston Astros (2018, 2019-23), Kansas City Royals (2019) and Chicago Cubs (2019).

He hit .191 with 15 homers and 36 RBIs in 116 games for the Astros in 2023. He has appeared in each of the last six postseasons with the Astros, winning a World Series championship in 2022.

Maldonado is the second catcher the Sox have added this offseason. They acquired Max Stassi in a trade from the Atlanta Braves on Dec. 9.

Catchers Korey Lee and Carlos Pérez are also on the 40-man roster.

Maldonado made an impact on Lee, who played in the Astros organization before being dealt to the Sox on July 28.

“I got to be around Martín Maldonado, I got to learn from him, I got to see how he managed a pitching staff at that end,” Lee said in August of his time in the majors with the Astros in 2022. “Learned how he communicated with pitchers and it taught me a lot. I’m going to carry that further into my career and make it my way, but he taught me how to be a professional catcher.”

Maldonado brings that, and his big-game experience, to the Sox.

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After my freshman year at Evanston Township High School, where my final tackle football experience was starting center on the “B” team, I froze my 15-year-old behind off on a 50-yard-line wooden seat in Wrigley Field’s upper deck on a 5-degree Sunday in December 1963. I watched as the Bears beat the New York Giants 14-10 for the NFL championship, the team’s last until the glorious 1985 Super Bowl year.

(The single bathroom in our concourse was totally insufficient, I might add.)

My family had those fantastic season ticket seats with a live, sightline equivalent of today’s TV view courtesy of my grandfather, who purchased them in the 1930s. I accompanied Gramps and my dad to every home game from the time I was 10 until I headed off to college eight years later.

After that, I went to home games whenever I was in Chicago up until 2003, when a box office snafu after the Soldier Field makeover relocated us to an end zone, prompting me to give up my season tickets. Since then, I’ve joined the multitude of addicted TV viewers, rarely missing a game and often traversing complicated overland routes to catch December playoff games in remote, warm weather vacation spots with poor reception.

So why am I boring readers with one fan’s experience? Because, like most die-hard fans, I think I know what’s good and bad, smart and dumb, right and wrong, about this year’s team. And because I care, I wanna share, as Bears management heads into a postseason filled with promise and peril.

I’m not an insider like Tribune reporters Brad Biggs, Dan Wiederer or Colleen Kane, who do a great job covering this storied franchise, but I’ve watched enough games, and thought enough after their outcomes, to have opinions that might be worth considering.

I’m not going to talk about draft choices, free agents, cap space or who on the current roster should be re-signed, released or developed. I’ll leave those deep dives to the experts who live with the team day to day.

I will simply focus on the main centers of controversy: quarterback Justin Fields, head coach (and accidental defensive coordinator) Matt Eberflus and offensive coordinator Luke Getsy.

Fields is the most athletic Bears QB since Bobby Douglass a few decades ago: a great runner with a strong arm and good unscripted freelance ability, but a mediocre pocket passer who lacks the preternatural patience and field-scanning instincts of a Tom Brady or Aaron Rodgers.

So what to do? Work on pocket improvement? Of course, but it’s already happening and will continue, given better pass receivers, better pass routes and Fields’ estimable work ethic.

But in the meantime, he should play to his strengths, with more rollout run-pass options and frequent use of a no-huddle, hurry-up offense that top colleges use to keep defenses off balance.

If Getsy gets it, he hasn’t shown it, so it’s probably time for an offensive coordinator who does, especially late in games, when poor play selection this past season contributed to several inexcusable meltdown losses, costing the team a playoff spot.

I also blame Eberflus’ defensive approach for those same meltdowns, and here’s why. Stellar defensive units — and the Bears have one most of the time — get tired in the fourth quarter. The pass rush penetrates less, and the defensive backs cover a bit less assuredly, so opposing QBs secure in the pocket complete passes and move their teams down the field.

The obvious remedy, when Cover 2 is vulnerable, is more aggressive stunts and blitzes to throw those QBs off balance. That was lacking in those late collapses, along with the shoddy offensive play calls.

There you have it — one really old fan’s perspective.

I don’t know how general manager Ryan Poles and team President Kevin Warren plan to address these three key pieces of the puzzle, along with the rest of their offseason opportunities.

But my hope, and I feel it from the bottom of my lifelong fan’s heart, is that they keep Fields and support him with offensive coaching that can maximize and elevate his incredible talent, and defensive game plans that make opposing quarterbacks run scared instead of sitting back and calmly picking the secondary apart.

On to 2024!

Andy Shaw has been a lifelong Chicago sports fan, in addition to holding down day jobs as a journalist and good government advocate.

Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.

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