Supported by a mechanical excavator, student-paleontologists Michael Metzger and Randall Goldsmith retrieve remains of a woolly mammoth or mastodon from a peat bog in Chemung County. A femur bone from the excavation is on display today in the Department of Geological Sciences in Snee Hall. More pictures. Cornell News Service
Thousands of years after a woolly mammoth (or its elephant-like cousin, a mastodon) drowned in an Ice Age kettle lake, Cornell students are excavating the well-preserved remains from what is now a peat bog in Chemung County, N.Y.
For students knee-deep in Geology 491, the class is a chance to learn paleontological techniques at a site near Cornell's campus. For paleoecologists, the excavation is expected to yield details about the North American environment some 10,000 to 15,000 years ago when the huge mammal perished.
"We've just pulled out a spectacular hip bone and a great humerus and a second set of sacral vertebrae," reported John J. Chiment, a Cornell paleontologist and instructor for Geology 491, from an undisclosed site on private property south of Watkins Glen. Since the landowners already had recovered one sacrum (part of the backbone between the hip bones) and because no known animal has two sets of sacral vertebrae, Chiment observes, "We must have two animals here, and this one is considerably larger than the first."
The first skeleton came to light in September when the landowners began excavation to deepen an existing pond. Beneath the peat bottom of the pond they found several bones that were clearly larger than a cow's and called Cornell for advice.
Among the experts responding were Chiment and Frank H.T. Rhodes, professor of geological sciences and president emeritus of the university. They determined that the sacrum, ilium and scapula bones were indeed from a woolly mammoth or a mastodon -- exactly which won't be known until investigators can examine the teeth -- and advised that a careful excavation was in order to preserve a scientifically valuable specimen. The landowners covered the big bones with wet peat (the ancient, partly decayed plant matter that is characteristic of bogs) to seal out air, and they allowed the pond to refill.
Then last week the paleontological excavation began, first by pumping out pond water and building coffer dams to hold the water away from the bones, which are mired in the clay bottom of the pond. One of the first to set foot on the pond bottom since the Ice Age, College of Arts and Sciences sophomore Michael Metzger shared that sinking feeling with the long-drowned mammal when the slippery muck pulled his legs ever deeper. He was promptly rescued by his classmates, with hydraulic help from an excavator machine. A matrix of planks and wooden pallets now provide a secure scaffolding around the bones.
Today the pond is located in a baseball diamond-sized clearing in a hemlock forest. In the days of the mammoths and mastodons, repeated episodes of glaciation had already shaped the terrain of New York's Finger Lakes region, leaving, among other features, the deep depressions called kettle lakes. One possible explanation for the mammoth's demise is that it may have fallen through the ice covering of a kettle lake.
While undergraduate students dig for bones, hair and other animal remains, geology graduate student Joan M. Ramage is "rescuing" old wood. Trees that shared the animal's watery grave will be cut to reveal their tree-ring patterns. But if trees in the bog really are from the time of the glaciers, dendrochronology won't be much help in determining their age;the oldest knoown chronology for New York area trees reaches back only 300 years.
However, there is no shortage of carbon for radioisotope dating of the trees. Acidic conditions of the bog have so well preserved the carbon that the wood will burn (with a little preliminary drying) in a fireplace.
Dendrochronology combined with carbon-14 dating, Ramage says, should reveal precisely when the trees lived and died -- and, presuming the trees fell in the pond along with the mammals, when they died, too. There's no shortage of carbon for radioisotope dating of the trees, she notes. Acidic conditions of the bog have so well preserved the carbon that the wood will burn (with a little preliminary drying) in a fireplace.
Coming as it does when geneticists in Russia try to clone a woolly mammoth that was frozen in Siberian tundra, excavation of the Chemung mammoth/mastodon highlights the "advantages" of burial in peat.
"Each kind of environment -- frozen tundra, dry sand or acidic peat -- preserves DNA protein differently," Chiment told a CNN reporter at the site last week. To make the "Jurassic Park" scenario a reality, DNA from animals at different sites may be needed to complete the genome of a mammoth or mastodon, he said. Even then, the challenges of producing a clone -- from an embryo placed in a modern day elephant, as some have suggested -- would be formidable, Chiment said.
Cornell researchers are not harvesting mammoth/mastodon DNA, but there is plenty of other material at the site to interest them. Pollen and other plant materials will go to the L.H. Bailey Hortorium where paleobotanists have expertise is ancient greenery. And biologists want to examine the remains of insects and small mammals that were preserved in the bog.
College of Arts and Sciences sophomore Randall Goldsmith said he's really more interested in the theoretical aspects of biochemistry, but he signed up for the course "to see chemistry in action." As students worked through the weekend, excavating bones that the bog has preserved in nearly perfect condition, the chemistry scholar won't be disappointed.
Cornell's Department of Geological Sciences celebrates Earth Sciences Week with an open house today, Oct. 14, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. in Snee Hall. Displays include mammoth and mastodon materials, devonian glass sponge fossils from Interlaken, ground-penetrating radar and an opportunity to see your own house from the vantage point of an orbiting satellite.
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