Unlike some other people I’ve seen online, I don’t find this story funny at all, especially because this stunt was performed by two men in their late 40s, which makes me think alcohol was involved. They wanted to be photographed hanging from it, and it broke under their weight.
Not funny, yes. Unusual, definitely.
This seems to be the mammoth in question.
Two men from California? Florida men are breathing a sigh of relief…“It ain’t us this time!”
Also, they didn’t “accidentally” destroy it. There’s surely a different word to describe their little mishap.
Malicious mischief, perhaps?
Criminal mischief for sure, maybe throw in vandalism.
Whereas in Alabama, the tusks are looser. 
Go to your room and think about what you just did!
But that is totally irrelephant to what we’re talking about.
Yeah, I mean we have “they destroyed it on purpose!”- Nope. Vs “It was all an accident!” Nope. Depraved indifference?
I’m chalking it up to blatant red neck-ism.
I used to work in a museum as a collection’s manager and sometimes docent, and I’m happy to report the vast majority of our visitors were very nice and respectful of the exhibits. On a few occasions I ran into problems with people who thought the Jeep was the perfect place to sit for a nice photo opportunity. During one school tour, I ended up taking a ball away from some teenager because he wouldn’t stop bouncing it (I politely asked him twice not to bounce it in the museum).
I don’t think we had anything in our museum worth $200,000. Not any single artifact at least. But we care about the artifacts entrusted into our care even if their monetary value isn’t great. We’re tasked with preserving these artifacts as best we can so we can educate and inform future generations. I can imagine how angry and upset about this incident. I’m with the OP. I don’t find this at all funny.
Don’t you mean "We’re tusked with preserving… " ?
Goddamn it. I laughed louder than I should have.
(boo, hiss, rimshot)
I don’t think it’s funny, and I don’t think it’s accidental, but unless the tusk disintegrated into dust when it fell, i don’t think it was destroyed, either. I expect the curators will glue it back together and return it to display.
I don’t think they intended to damage it, but instead hang from the tusks and take selfies. That’s NOT normal behavior for (sober) men their ages.
“Here, hold my tusk!” said no mammoth ever.
the mammoth roamed at a time when people were not as fat advanced … hence it wasn’t up to the tusk.
Side-Q: who and how is the value of tusks established? … why $200k (as opposed to 150 or 300k; will they appreciate over time)? … just wondering, whenever I see $xxx asigned to something that is intrinsically non-commercial. I assume insurance-values/tiers/etc… play a role here, but still …
I was wondering that, too.
Mammoth tusks do have commercial value. It’s legal to sell mammoth ivory, because you can tell by looking at it that it’s not elephant ivory. (I forget the difference, but a friend who collected netsuke showed me once, in a museum collection of a ton of carved ivory things, and once he showed me, it was easy for me to tell which was which. Something about the grain.) And i suppose whole tusks are worth more than broken ones, because you can carve a large thing out of a tusk. But lots of small ivory carvings are sold, too, so it’s not as if breaking it destroys all the value, even commercially.
But i assume this set was valued for something more than just the trinkets you could make it into.
Maybe they were just overenthusiastic fans of The Way Things Work.