Mastodon mania: Students here and worldwide learn from bones

By Roger Segelken

For a jumbled pile of bones in a muddy farm pond, the Cornell-Gilbert Mastodon turned out to be quite an educational resource.

Mastodon project workers lay out the Cornell-Gilbert skeleton for the first time at the Paleontology Research Institution. In the back row, from left, are: Tracy Rozelle, docent at the fossil museum; John Chiment, project manager; Jim Sherpa, curator; and Edward Crandt, M.D., collector. At the front, from left, are: Elias Kontiz, graduate student; Amanda Erwin, undergraduate; Nerissa Russell, assistant professor of anthropology; and her daughter, Marina Lizarralde, a Dewitt Middle School student. Frank DiMeo/University Photography

The backhoe operator who first uncovered massive brown bones in Chemung County near Watkins Glen, N.Y., in 1999 thought he was seeing an ancient horse. Cornell experts who responded to a call for aid, including President Emeritus Frank H.T. Rhodes and geological sciences instructor John J. Chiment, determined the creature was either a wooly mammoth or a mastodon, the extinct elephant-like beasts that roamed this area during the last ice age.

When Cornell undergraduates in a paleontology class uncovered the creature's jaw bones, they learned to resolve the mastodon/mammoth question in favor of mastodons, which have pointed cusps on their teeth, while mammoths (and modern elephants) have flatter chewing surfaces. The students spent the fall of 1999 knee-deep in mud, eventually retrieving more than 200 bones from a mastodon whose age, at death, they estimated at about 35 years.

Other materials in the 12,100-year-old burial site -- a geological feature called a kettle hole that was left by melting ice from glaciers -- turned the Cornell-Gilbert Mastodon into a multidisciplinary project. There was well preserved wood from 17 species of trees for dendrochronologists, the tree-ring counters, as well as seeds and cones from all kinds of plants for paleobotanists to puzzle over.

Anaerobic conditions in the kettle hole that became a bog had also preserved parts of muskrats and other mammals. Beetles that were mired in the muck for thousands of years were still iridescent green, a delight to paleoentomologists, Even etymologists, the word-origin experts, got a workout when mastodon tusks were uncovered and the county's name, "Chemung," was found to be derived from the Cayuga Indian term for "great horn."

That prompted speculation that Iroquois Indians, a few hundred years ago, were finding enough mastodon bones to name part of their territory for the great horns. "There's no shortage of mastodons in New York state," Chiment said. "Settlers started finding them in the 1700s. Any kettle hole-bog might have one or two, and the Cayugas may have been the first mastodon paleontologists around here."

And thoughts of Native Americans led to an even more intriguing question: Were Ice Age Paleoindians, who apparently shared this part of North America with mastodons, eating meat of mastodons -- and this one in particular? Assistant Professor of Anthropology Nerissa Russell, an expert in early humans' relationships to animals, tackled the question with the help of Amanda Erwin, a Cornell undergraduate in search of a senior honors thesis project.

Russell and Erwin examined every bone, looking for telltale marks of butchering by Paleoindians' tools that might have cut through flesh to scrape the bone. They did find bones that fractured and healed before the animal died, as well as evidence of bone-disfiguring illnesses.

"There are marks on the bones but clearly they are not cut marks," Russell says, adding that other damage to bones and joints "might be due to other mastodons trampling through and stomping on this one." Visions of Ice Age havoc in a small pond were stirred when the student-paleontologists discovered a partial skeleton from another mastodon, together with tongue bones from a woolly mammoth.

The general public is getting a glimpse of paleontologists in action at Ithaca's Paleontological Research Institution (PRI), where the Cornell-Gilbert Mastodon was taken for cleaning and preparation. PRI Director Warren Allmon, an adjunct associate professor of earth and atmospheric sciences, sectioned off a fossil-preparation laboratory with a transparent wall so museum visitors could watch the work and ask questions of the scientists and students. The cleaned bones were laid out last month in PRI's exhibit space with a theatrical flourish, on a curtain loaned by Cornell's theater arts department.

Spectators missed the 1999 excavation of the Cornell Gilbert Mastodon because the site location was kept secret, at the request of the landowners. However, a second mastodon excavation in Hyde Park, N.Y., in the fall of 2000 became an educational spectacle when PRI offered public seating to observe students from Cornell and other colleges at work. Both excavations received extensive news coverage.

The Chemung skeleton will stay at PRI for the foreseeable future, where it will be available for research and teaching, but it won't suffer the fate of many museum specimens: drilled and wired together for display. Instead, lightweight models of the mastodon bones will be cast from the originals and assembled for exhibit in places such as Cornell's Snee Hall and perhaps even in shopping malls, Chiment says.

In the meantime, Chiment and his volunteer helpers are busy with another education project that breaks new ground for "recycling." Tons of muck that surrounded the mastodon skeleton -- known as "matrix" in archaeology terms -- were hauled to Ithaca, dried and parceled into "mastodon baggies" for distribution to school classes. A few hundred youngsters near Ithaca were expected to sort through the matrix, looking for small fossils and learning about paleontology.

Instead, the demand for mastodon baggies was overwhelming. Thousands were sent to schoolteachers, home schoolers, youth groups, senior-citizen homes and even prisons around the world. Sharon Weibman, a Cornell paleobotany student, took mastodon matrix to her old high school in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., during winter break to teach classes in advanced placement geology. "This school always encouraged me to go toward science," Weibman said. "I just wanted to give something back."

After matrix from the Chemung excavation ran out, the Cornell baggie packers turned to mud from the Hyde Park excavation, and Chiment thought that, surely, the matrix mania would subside.

Then Boy's Life, the magazine of the Boy Scouts of America, ran a story about mastodon matrix and gave the address at Cornell.

"Now we need another 1,000 bags," Chiment said.