An elephant expert whose Texas beach home was destroyed by Hurricane Ike is putting his collection back together – one tooth at a time.

Roy Davis, who once worked at the Oklahoma City Zoo, evacuated his Bolivar Peninsula home on Sept. 11, two days before Ike slammed the Texas coast.

Davis, 57, said Thursday that among the items scattered out of his one-bedroom house were prized animal keepsakes from his years working at zoos.

“I probably had 30 pieces of modern-day elephants, they shed their teeth, they wear them down,” Davis said.

Two treasured elephant teeth have now been returned to Davis, after media reports about what appeared to be an unusual fossil find on the beach.

Davis says he lived a couple of doors down from Lamar University educator Dorothy Sisk, whose house in the community of Caplen also was destroyed by Ike.

Sisk and a Lamar colleague, paleontologist Jim Westgate, went to the area a few days after the Sept. 13 hurricane to see what was left of her place.

They came upon a 6-pound tooth that Westgate recognized as a fossil from a mammoth common to North America until around 10,000 years ago.

The second tooth, from an African elephant, was discovered Oct. 4 on the beach by a reporter doing a story on the original find.

Eventually, the teeth made it back to Davis after media accounts surfaced about a fossil possibly washing ashore.Davis has had the mammoth’s tooth since the mid-1980s when it turned up at a construction site in Tyler. At the time Davis was head elephant trainer at Caldwell Zoo.

Davis, a Moore, Okla., native, says the African elephant tooth came from when he was working at the Oklahoma City Zoo. An elephant named Timboo died in the 1970s.

“Since I was the only one that could handle the animal at the time, they gave it to me as a remembrance of the elephant,” he said.

As for the rest of his elephant items?

“They’re still somewhere on the beach down there,” Davis said. “None have shown up yet. They may. If they don’t, they turn up 10-15 years from now.”

Westgate was glad to return the mammoth fossil to Davis.

“All the houses in Caplen are no longer there. It’s kind of neat that he got something back after that total loss,” said Westgate.