Animals of the Past

by Frederic A. Lucas

Many a mastodon has come to light since the time of Koch, for while it is commonly supposed that remains of the animal are great rarities, as a matter of fact they are quite common, and it may safely be said that during the seasons of ditching, draining, and well-digging not a week passes without one or more mastodons being unearthed. Not that these are complete skeletons, very far from it, the majority of finds are scattered teeth, crumbling tusks, or massive leg-bones, but still the mastodon is far commoner in the museums of this country than is the African elephant, for at the present date there are eleven of the former to one of the latter, the single skeleton of African elephant being that of Jumbo in the American Museum of Natural History. If one may judge by the abundance of bones, mastodons must have been very numerous in some favored localities such as parts of Michigan, Florida, and Missouri and about Big Bone Lick, Ky. Perhaps the most noteworthy of all deposits is that at Kimmswick, about twenty miles south of St. Louis, where in a limited area Mr. L. W. Beehler has exhumed bones representing several hundred individuals, varying in size from a mere baby mastodon up to the great tusker whose wornout teeth proclaim that he had reached the limit of even mastodonic old age. The spot where this remarkable deposit was found is at the foot of a bluff near the junction of two little streams, and it seems probable that in the days when these were larger the spring floods swept down the bodies of animals that had perished during the winter to ground in an eddy beneath the bluff. Or as the place abounds in springs of sulphur and salt water it may be that this was where the animals assembled during cold weather, just as the moas are believed to have gathered in the swamps of New Zealand, and here the weaker died and left their bones.

The mastodon must have looked very much like any other elephant, though a little shorter in the legs and somewhat more heavily built than either of the living species, while the head was a trifle flatter and the jaw decidedly longer. The tusks are a variable quantity, sometimes merely bowing outwards, often curving upwards to form a half circle; they were never so long as the largest mammoth tusks, but to make up for this they were a shade stouter for their length. As the mastodon ranged well to the north it is fair to suppose that he may have been covered with long hair, a supposition that seems to be borne out by the discovery, noted by Rembrandt Peale, of a mass of long, coarse, woolly hair buried in one of the swamps of Ulster County, New York. And with these facts in mind, aided by photographs of various skeletons of mastodons, Mr. Gleeson made the restoration which accompanies this chapter.

Fig. 40.—The Mastodon.
From a drawing by J. M. Gleeson.

As for the size of the mastodon, this, like that of the mammoth, is popularly much over-estimated, and it is more than doubtful if any attained the height of a full-grown African elephant. The largest femur, or thigh-bone, that has come under the writer's notice was one he measured as it lay in the earth at Kimmswick, and this was just four feet long, three inches shorter than the thigh-bone of Jumbo. Several of the largest thigh-bones measured show so striking an unanimity in size, between 46 and 47 inches in length, that we may be pretty sure they represent the average old "bull" mastodon, and if we say that these animals stood ten feet high we are probably doing them full justice. An occasional tusk reaches a length of ten feet, but seven or eight is the usual size, with a diameter of as many inches, and this is no larger than the tusks of the African elephant would grow if they had a chance. It is painful to be obliged to scale down the mastodon as we have just done the mammoth, but if any reader knows of specimens larger than those noted, he should by all means publish their measurements.[20]

[20] As skeletons are sometimes mounted, they stand a full foot or more higher at the shoulders than the animal stood in life, this being caused by raising the body until the shoulder-blades are far below the tips of the vertebræ, a position they never assume in life.

The disappearance of the mastodon is as difficult to account for as that of the mammoth, and, as will be noted, there is absolutely no evidence to show that man had any hand in it. Neither can it be ascribed to change of climate, for the mastodon, as indicated by the wide distribution of its bones, was apparently adapted to a great diversity of climates, and was as much at home amid the cool swamps of Michigan and New York as on the warm savannas of Florida and Louisiana. Certainly the much used, and abused, glacial epoch cannot be held accountable for the extermination of the creature, for the mastodon came into New York after the recession of the great ice-sheet, and tarried to so late a date that bones buried in the swamps retain much of their animal matter. So recent, comparatively speaking, has been the disappearance of the mastodon, and so fresh-looking are some of its bones, that Thomas Jefferson thought in his day that it might still be living in some part of the then unexplored Northwest.

It is a moot question whether or not man and the mastodon were contemporaries in North America, and while many there be who, like the writer of these lines, believe that this was the case, an expression of belief is not a demonstration of fact. The best that can be said is that there are scattered bits of testimony, slight though they are, which seem to point that way, but no one so strong by itself that it could not be shaken by sharp cross-questioning and enable man to prove an alibi in a trial by jury. For example, in the great bone deposit at Kimmswick, Mo., Mr. Beehler found a flint arrowhead, but this may have lain just over the bone-bearing layer, or have got in by some accident in excavating. How easily a mistake may be made is shown by the report sent to the United States National Museum of many arrowheads associated with mastodon bones in a spring at Afton, Indian Territory. This spring was investigated, and a few mastodon bones and flint arrowheads were found, but the latter were in a stratum just above the bones, although this was overlooked by the first diggers.[21] Koch reported finding charcoal and arrowheads so associated with mastodon bones that he inferred the animal to have been destroyed by fire and arrows after it became mired. It has been said that Koch could have had no object in disseminating this report, and hence that it may be credited, but he had just as much interest in doing this as he did in fabricating the Hydrarchus and the Missourium, and his testimony is not to be considered seriously. It seems to be with the mastodon much as it is with the sea-serpent; the latter never appears to a naturalist, remains of the former are never found by a trained observer associated with indications of the presence of man. Perhaps an exception should be made in the case of Professor J. M. Clarke, who found fragments of charcoal in a deposit of muck under some bones of mastodon.

[21] This locality has just been carefully investigated by Mr. W. H. Holmes of the United States National Museum who found bones of the mastodon and Southern Mammoth associated with arrowheads. But he also found fresh bones of bison, horse, and wolf, showing that these and the arrowheads had simply sunk to the level of the older deposit.

We may pass by the so-called "Elephant Mound," which to the eye of an unimaginative observer looks as if it might have been intended for any one of several beasts; also, with bated breath and due respect for the bitter controversy waged over them, pass we by the elephant pipes. There remains, then, not a bit of man's handiwork, not a piece of pottery, engraved stone, or scratched bone that can unhesitatingly be said to have been wrought into the shape of an elephant before the coming of the white man. True, there is "The Lenape Stone," found near Doyleston, Pa., in 1872, a gorget graven on one side with the representation of men attacking an elephant, while the other bears a number of figures of various animals. The good faith of the finder of this stone is unimpeachable, but it is a curious fact that, while this gorget is elaborately decorated on both sides, no similar stone, out of all that have been found, bears any image whatsoever. On the other hand, if not made by the aborigines, who made it, why was it made, and why did nine years elapse between the discovery of the first and second portions of the broken ornament? These are questions the reader may decide for himself; the author will only say that to his mind the drawing is too elaborate, and depicts entirely too much to have been made by a primitive artist. A much better bit of testimony seems to be presented by a fragment of Fulgur shell found near Hollyoak, Del., and now in the United States National Museum, which bears a very rudely scratched image of an animal that may have been intended for a mastodon or a bison. This piece of shell is undeniably old, but there is, unfortunately, the uncertainty just mentioned as to the animal depicted. The familiar legend of the Big Buffalo that destroyed animals and men and defied even the lightnings of the Great Spirit has been thought by some to have originated in a tradition of the mastodon handed down from ancient times; but why consider that the mastodon is meant? Why not a legendary bison that has increased with years of story-telling? And so the co-existence of man and mastodon must rest as a case of not proven, although there is a strong probability that the two did live together in the dim ages of the past, and some day the evidence may come to light that will prove it beyond a peradventure. If scientific men are charged with obstinacy and unwarranted incredulity in declining to accept the testimony so far presented, it must be remembered that the evidence as to the existence of the sea serpent is far stronger, since it rests on the testimony of eye-witnesses, and yet the creature himself has never been seen by a trained observer, nor has any specimen, not a scale, a tooth, or a bone, ever made its way into any museum.