WISCONSIN.
(Map [11].)
1. Milwaukee.—In the Public Museum of Milwaukee are considerable parts of a mammoth skeleton (No. 5351) found within the limits of the city. These were secured in May 1898, in excavating for a sewer along Cold Spring avenue and between Twenty-ninth and Thirtieth streets. On learning of the discovery, Mr. George B. Turner, then taxidermist of the Milwaukee Public Museum, afterwards chief taxidermist in the U. S. National Museum, took charge of the excavations for the skeleton. He furnished the writer with an account of his work, giving a list of the bones, a plan of the area excavated, and a section of the deposits passed through. A description of the remains is given below:
| Feet. | Inches. | |
|---|---|---|
| Filled-in materials | 4 | 0 |
| Clay and peat, mixed | 1 | 0 |
| Peat | 1 | 3 |
| Peat and clay, mixed | 1 | 0 |
| Peat, clay, and shells | 1 | 0 |
| Clear blue clay with the elephant bones at the bottom | 4 | 6 |
| Gravel and cobblestones | undetermined. | |
As indicated in Turner’s sketch, the surface of the gravel and stones sloped downward toward the north.
It will be seen that the bones were buried about 9 or 10 feet below the natural surface of the ground. The head of the elephant was directed toward the east, the hinder end toward the west. The parts found were within a distance of 10 feet from east to west. Later the excavations on each side of the sewer were extended eastward, as shown on the plan, in an effort to find the skull, but without success, and iron rods 10 feet long, in two sections, were driven their full length horizontally everywhere around the excavation in the hope of recovering the skull.
For some time after the finding of these bones the theory prevailed that they had belonged to an elephant of one of the circuses which had made use of the ground near there. The fact that the lower jaw was found, but not the upper jaw and the brain-case, and only a part of the vertebræ and a part of the foot-bones, is sufficient to dispose of this theory. Also, some of the bones lack the epiphyses. Besides this, the elephant was neither the African nor the Asiatic species. It is evident that the animal after dying had lain on the surface for some time, so that the bones were somewhat scattered, perhaps by wolves or waves, and some were injured by exposure to the weather.
The following is a list of the bones found: Lower jaw, 5 cervicals, 9 presacrals, 31 ribs, both scapulæ, both humeri, both ulnæ, both radii, 9 wristbones, 14 metacarpals and phalanges, 1 femur and a fragment of the other, 2 tibiæ, 2 fibulæ, 17 metatarsals and phalanges.
It is evident that this elephant lived and died after the Lake Michigan ice-lobe had withdrawn from that vicinity. It may, however, not have been long after that withdrawal; for it is probable that the muddy waters from the foot of that glacial lobe furnished the blue clay which enveloped the bones. Later peat and muck and mixtures of these with clay accumulated over the blue clay. The place is within the area of what Alden has mapped as ground moraine of Lake Michigan glacier. The occurrence of peat and shells seems to show that there was a pond in which the elephant had been buried and afterwards covered with clay and peat.
Under this number must be included the fine palate and teeth found in excavating for a sewer on the South Side, at Milwaukee. The record as to exact location, depth, and kind of materials overlying it is missing. A description of it, with illustrations, was published by the present writer in 1912 (Iowa Geol. Surv., vol. XXIII, p. 409, plate LIX).
This individual probably had a history not greatly different from that of the Cold Spring Avenue elephant.