Mastodon fossils found in Morrow County

MORROW COUNTY – Ten students from Ashland University and five archeology students from The College of Wooster, along with several volunteers, spent Saturday in the middle of a soybean field in Morrow County on a mastodon excavation.

The tusked beasts lived during the Ice Age, at least 10,000 years ago.

Nigel Brush, associate professor of geology at Ashland University, said bits of bone and tusk fragments were found last year by a farmer during the excavation of a drainage ditch.

On Saturday, Brush was excited as he showed a visitor an area where volunteers were working. They could see fragments on the surface.

"I've been waiting ...... for 21 years to do this," Brush said. "We found one in 1993 in Berlin. It was found the same way. They were draining a wet area. Actually, there they left it lay for 55 years. They'd actually photographed the femur, they dug it out and brought the teeth up when they were running the trenching machine through, so they knew it was a mastodon. They called a professor from The College of Wooster, and he identified it. They did a little excavation and brought up a femur, but it was all broken — they had it laying on a board.

"The story was they threw it back in the swamp once they took the photograph," he added.

Brush asked that the exact excavation site not be publicly identified in order to protect the fossils.

"We've established where the ditch is at here. ... Somewhere between here and there is where they hit the skull (with a backhoe). We're not sure if the body is laying on this side or that side or it's vertical and just the head is sticking up."

Is there a complete skeleton there waiting to be discovered? It's difficult to say.

The find spot was immediately adjacent to a natural pond, and the tile was installed to follow a natural swale that drained higher parts of the field into the pond. The tile trench was inadvertently dug through the level where the teeth and jaw bone material were lying, about three feet below the surface. A possible scenario is that thousands of years ago the remains of a dead mastodon were somewhere not too far upslope from the pond, and over time this material moved downward toward the wetland when the swale acted more like a full-time stream. Eventually, some of the skeletal parts or perhaps the whole carcass would become buried in transported sediments near the edge of the present pond, according to information from the Ohio History Connection, formerly known as the Ohio Historical Society.

"There is also the possibility that this mastodon may have been driven into the nearby bog by Paleoindians in order to trap, kill and butcher it, so we will also be looking for flint tools or evidence of cut marks on the bones," Brush said.

Teams of volunteers are working Saturdays on the excavation, the professor said.

Dave Dyer, curator of natural history for the Ohio History Connection, also was there to help. He said mastodons have been found all over the state.

"And usually it's like a tooth or stray bone," Dyer said. "They're not rare, but they're not common, either."

Ashland University student Dave Hogue, whose career goal is to become a paleontologist, said the day was going well.

"It's my first real professional dig," he said as students headed back to excavate after a short lunch break.

Blair Heidkamp of the Chicago area, a senior at The College of Wooster, jumped as a big spider walked in the rich soil in a flattened area she was assigned to trowel.

"We're picking at the dirt. Other times at other sites, we scrape along. But this way if we find something, it's not going to be scraped and ruined or broken in pieces," she said.

Other students whose career plans don't include becoming archeologists or geologists were enjoying the excavation as part of a college course, Discovering the Ice Age.

Jerry Ball, of Lucas, and Richard Partin, of Perrysville, who retired from Westinghouse and General Motors respectively, were happy to be part of the dig, calling themselves "pre-history buffs."

Both men said they like volunteering and collecting Native American artifacts and have advanced their interests by excavating throughout parts of Ohio, including Portsmouth and Fremont.

"It's a serious hobby," said Partin, who got interested in excavations after doing surface hunting since 1969.

Ball echoed the comment, saying both men have been walking fields and looking for artifacts since the 1970s.

lwhitmir@nncogannett.com

419-521-7223

Twitter: @LWhitmir