A mammoth story

OTTAWA — It was a late July afternoon when Kieran Shepherd got a call from the Canadian embassy in Washington with a message: The FBI had something pretty old that they wanted to give him.

What they wanted to give Shepherd, curator of paleobiology at the Canadian Museum of Nature, was a pair of mammoth tusks taken from Canada more than 50 years ago.

Their path home is the most unusual Shepherd has seen in his 30 years at the national museum and involves a massive FBI investigation, an infamous American collector, the RCMP and diplomats on both sides of the border.

“Most of the material we have our scientists have collected, so it’s pretty rare to have a repatriation,” Shepherd said Thursday at the museum’s fossil collections centre in Gatineau, Que.

The story — which is not yet over — reads like a detective novel, he said.

The FBI recovered the tusks from the Indiana home of Don Miller, who had them as part a massive collection that included Indigenous arrowheads, fossils, shrunken skulls and a chunk of concrete he claimed was from the bunker where Adolf Hitler died at the end of the Second World War, among other items from countries such as China, Russia, Greece, Italy and Papua New Guinea.

There was also some of his own memorabilia, including items from the day he was apparently involved in testing the first atom bomb in 1945. His involvement in the Manhattan Project was the focus of a four-part series in his local newspaper in 2007.

He regularly gave local children a look through his personal museum and the collection he had amassed through trips that crossed the globe.

Miller was 91 when the FBI raided his home in 2014 alleging that he had improperly collected the artifacts. Miller co-operated with investigators and no charges were ever laid. An FBI spokesperson said the investigation remains open.

Miller told investigators before his death in 2015 that he brought the tusks home from a trip between Calgary and the YukonAlaska border in 1960 and believed