A New York man digs up a mastodon fossil in his backyard

Some people want a hippopotamus as a Christmas gift, but a man in Scotchtown, New York, got a mastodon.

The man, who does not want to reveal his identity, found a fossilized mastodon jaw, complete with the extinct giant’s distinctive teeth, in his backyard earlier this year. Scotchtown is located about 70 miles (112 kilometers) northwest of New York City, and the jaw is the first to be found in the state in more than a decade.

The first mastodon found in North America was discovered by a Dutch farmer at Claverack, New York, in 1705. Nearly 150 fossils of extinct elephant relatives have been found across the state — about a third of them in Orange County — and according to New York is untappedMore than a dozen mastodon fossils have been found in New York City alone. Suffice it to say that southern New York was central in Mastodon’s day.

Mastodons should not be confused with mammoths, although both roamed the Earth during the Pleistocene and some of the Holocene. But there are some Differences; Mastodon heads were flatter and their tusks were less curved. But the most obvious difference is in the teeth: mastodon teeth have conical points—fittingly, since the name “mastodon” literally means “breast tooth.”

According to Robert Veranek, director of research and collections at the New York State Museum and curator of Ice Age mammals, the man found the mastodon while gardening and originally mistook the teeth for baseballs.

The owner of the house in a museum said: “When I found the teeth and examined them in my hands, I knew they were something special and decided to seek the help of experts.” He releases. “I am thrilled that our property has yielded such an important discovery for the scientific community.”

Subsequent excavations by museum staff and the State University of New York, Orange County, yielded a fragment of a toe bone, part of a rib, and the complete jaw of an adult mastodon.

“While the jaw is the star of the show, the additional toe and rib fragments provide valuable context and the potential for additional research,” Corey Harris, an anthropologist at SUNY Orange, said in the same release. “We also hope to further explore the surrounding area to see if there are any additional bones preserved.”

In recent years, advances in ancient DNA research have helped scientists better understand living organisms The Life and Times of North American Cymbals. In 2022, a team of researchers was able to decipher most of the… Life history of the Buesching mastodon– Affectionately called Fred – from his 13,000-year-old tusk.

The researchers plan to carbon-date the mastodon’s jaw to determine its exact age, as well as its diet and the type of habitat it lived in, just as the aforementioned team did with Fred. According to the museum, the fossil will be displayed sometime in 2025.

North America’s hose is gone Extinct About 10,500 years ago, but their remains still reveal how ancient monsters lived.