'Pawn Stars' boss Rick Harrison negotiates deal to buy 100,000-year-old item for $1,700
"Pawn Stars" has featured items that aren't a common sight in most pawn shops, since it even buys things that belong in a museum. From historic documents t dinosaur bones and fossils, Rick Harrison has managed to cut lucrative deals for almost anything. He is known for buying all kinds of weird stuff, but sometimes, he picks up pieces of history like a mastodon tusk, which was a hundred thousand years old. This happened when Harrison was on tour across the country, and a seller named Robert dropped the incredible item on his table. Once Harrison found out that it was the real deal, he squeezed it out from the seller's hands at a price of $1,700.
The guest brought the clean-looking tusk to Harrison, claiming it was a fossil from thousands of years ago. Harrison noted that there was some text printed on the tusk which indicated that it was a mastodon tusk from Point Barrow, Alaska. "It's really odd that it's sliced like that. But uh, super cool," Harrison noted. The guest shared that the item was probably dug up by three people in Point Barrow, and they may have cut it into three pieces to divide it amongst themselves. "That's crazy, because it would have been worth so much more as a whole," Harrison said in response.
The pawn shop boss then went on to explain that the item could be valuable given its age. "So mastodons, I mean, they were all over North America until 7,000, 8,000, 10,000 years ago. And when human beings ended up in North America, they're the ones who ended up killing them all off, because I guess they were just really docile creatures, and then they would get killed," he said. Harrison then asked for the price, and Robert told him that he was looking to get $2,000 for it.
Harrison then decided to call in his expert paleontologist, Andre Lujan, to make sure the item was the real deal before making a bid. Upon looking at the item, Lujan noted that mastodons were rarer than mammoths, but they were smaller than forest elephants. "It looks like a really nice piece, the enamel is in really great shape, the ivory," he explained. Coming to the age of the fossil, he estimated that it could be tens of thousands to a few hundred thousand years old. Noting that the piece was the tip of the tusk, Lujan noted that it did carry some "man-made" damage as well.
The expert then said he had never seen a mastodon tusk come from Point Barrow. Thus, given the rarity of the item, he estimated it was worth $2,500, a little more than what Robert asked for. Once he left, Harrison got down to the negotiations and offered the guest, $1,400.
However, Robert wasn't looking to settle for such a low price, and he haggled with Harrison for some more money. In the end, Harrison came up to $1,700, and Robert chose to make a deal.
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