Treasure hunting in the East River

“Do you know how crazy it would be if there’s mammoth bones right there in the East River?” Joe Rogan asked Alaskan fossil hunter, John Reeves, when he appeared on Rogan’s podcast in December 2022. 

Pretty crazy.

But it didn’t stop a frenetic bone rush as several treasure hunters heading Reeve’s claim that the American Museum of Natural History had dumped a boxcar of 50 tons of mammoth bones near (what is now) FDR Drive and 65th Street back in the 1940s.  

Several groups of people dove into the frigid waters in early and mid-January last year to seek the supposedly missing bones. Men and women flew to New York in an attempt to find them. With water temperatures that dipped into the 30s Fahrenheit and strong currents, the attempts were going to be intense. The allure of adventure, though, was strong.

One of the groups, led by Donald Gann, took out two YouTubers, Donnie and Billy, who appear in the Youtube channel ‘The Wonton Don,’ to dive 75 feet deep into the East River in the search for bones. 

What they found was a muddy truth.

 “We do not have any record of the disposal of these fossils in the East River, nor have we been able to find any record of this report in the museum’s archives or other scientific sources,” the American Museum of Natural History told the AP. 

Reeves, who has discovered bones on his land in Alaska, talked about how prehistoric remains were discovered on that same land in the 20th century. The claim made by Reeves about the bones in the river comes from a report drafted by three men, including one who worked at the American Museum of Natural History, that made a reference to some fossils from that same land being dumped in the river due to unsuitability by the museum in the 1940s.

“No one’s finding these bones,” Billy says in the video blog.

For now, the bones, if there are any, will be buried in history.