Teeth Show Mastodon May Have Been Easy Mark

The photo  shows the full complement of four lower teeth.  It is "looking down" on the lower jaw (jaw bone absent) and the big teeth with the rounded ends are the back teeth.  (Photo by Scott Donaldson)

More confirmation that the mastodon killed and butchered in Morrow County was old came from an analysis of all four teeth recovered from the Cedar Creek Mastodon Site in Morrow County.

Scott Donaldson, who has led the work on restoring and preserving the teeth and served as one of the crew chiefs during the excavation, wrote a summary of his analysis that was e-mailed to volunteers on Nov. 2.

In his report, Donaldson said that if a mastodon lives to “ a ripe old age”, it will go through 24 teeth, shedding badly worn teeth from the front and erupting new ones at the back of the mouth, with either two or three teeth on each side of each jaw present at a given time.

He identified this mastodon as having its last teeth (numbers 5 and 6) on each side of the lower jaw. This and the amount of wear on the teeth indicated an advanced age.

He added that “…the apparent old age suggests a degree of infirmity which possibly made the animal vulnerable to being killed by man or beast, or which might be associated with a natural death.”

In the fall of 2013, a soybean farmer found two of the teeth, two feet apart, after they were unearthed when a ditch was dug to lay drainage pipe.  This triggered the excavation which began Aug. 23, 2014, and will end with a two-day excavation the weekend of Nov. 7-9.

Donaldson says the location of one of the teeth in Unit 5, one of  several 2- by 2-meter square excavation plots, “suggests that the as yet unidentified bone material nearby is part of the lower mandible [jaw bone]” the tooth came from.   A piece of jaw bone associated with the other three teeth was also found in the excavation.

Donaldson has done graduate work in anthropology/archaeology at Kent State University.  He has also done archaeology field and lab work with Dr. David Bush of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History field school.

Note:  I also have a website where I post information and photos on archaeology finds as well as all other aspects of natural history.  This blog and website began to catch the spillover from the monthly stories I write for the Apple Valley Cider Press, mainly a regular "Nature Article" feature.