The ancestor of the modern elephants; note the extreme heaviness of body and the sloping head. The mastodon was heavier than the modern elephant, though not as tall.
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.
The Siberian Mammoth.
A near relative of the Indian elephant, and like the mastodon, a contemporary of Primitive Man. Note the greater height due to length of limb, the thicker and coarser hair, and the straighter shape of skull; the tusk formation, also, is characteristic, and longer than in modern elephants.
The boy looked eagerly to the southward over the countryside.
“You’d like to go and start digging in Jackson’s Bog right now, wouldn’t you?” his uncle asked.
“Yes,” Perry answered with a laugh, “I would. I never thought that there might be a Mastodon so near home.”
“You don’t have to get far away from home to do fossil hunting,” his uncle reminded him. “I remember once I was talking to a group of young fellows in New York, bright working lads, and one of them said to me:
“‘Oh, Professor, if only those Wyoming-Texas places you talk about weren’t so far away! I’d mighty well like to do something like fossil-hunting on Sunday afternoons and holidays, but there isn’t any chance.’