Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 194, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 August 1911 — BONES OF MASTODON [ARTICLE]

BONES OF MASTODON

Fossil of . One of World's Most Colossal Creatures. Three Mammgth Molars Unearthed la Old Doggett Mine, Near WalkMy ~ - California—Largest Contain Four Cuspids Each.

San Francisco, ’’al.— ■Five gigantic teeth, which in some prehistoric period probably graced the cavernous mouth of a mastodon, predecessor of the mammoth, and one of the most colossal creatures that have ever inhabited the earth, have been unearned In the old Doggett mine, on the,banks of the Klamath river, near Walker, Cal. The three largest of these stupendous molars contain four cuspids each, each tooth measuring seven inches across from the first to the last cuspid and a little o er six inches from, the tip of the root, or that part of it which remains, to the top of the center cuspid. The teeth measure four and a half inches in width.

In a remarkable state of preservation, they were found in a pocket of sand and gravel eighteen feet under the surface of the earth, by a gftng of shovelmen in charge of Edward B. Frost, a mining engineer, who was in charge of an excavation project at the mine. That the teeth were those of an herbivorous animal seems evident from their evenness. They are too large to have belonged to the mammoth. This would seem to indicate that they belonged to the mastodon, which towered In size abov? the mammoth as that creature did above the modern elephant. Close to the teeth was found an ancient stone hatchet, which is believed to belong to a period co-ex-istent with that in which the animal to which the teeth belonged is believed to have lived. Indians of the Klamath river tribes, on being shown the hatchet, declared that they had •never seen or beard of-anything resembling It, and the medicine men and chiefß stated that the traditions of their people contained no account to show that the hatchet had ever been made or used by theip. In the same pocket where the teeth were found was a horn seven and a half,feet long, which crumbled in the hands of the shovelmen when they attempted to take it up. The horn measured at the butt fourteen inches in diameter, but, according to Frost, who has spent some time in Alaska, where he saw several specimens of the horn of the prehistoric mammoth unearthed, it bore no resemblance to the horn of that animal. The horn, Frost states, was of the same contour aB that of ordinary cattle, and contained a core and a thin shell similar to that of the ox. These relics were found in a stratum of earth which bears evidence of being the ancient channel of the Klamath or some other river from which the Klamath was evolved. The general formation of the earth gives every indication of having been massed ages and ages ago, and from the trees and the partly petrified trunks of trees which were found at bedrock twelve feet under where the relics were unearthed, there is every reason to believe that the teeth have lain imbedded where they were found upward of 10,000 years. That the teeth and horn could not have traveled far from the very spot where the animal met his death is the belief of Frost. He bases this on the fact that the gravel wopld grind to a powder anything that was caught in it as it slowly moved along as a mighty mass in the process of creating some new geologic formation. This he states is partly proved by the quick disintegration of the horn once it was touched by the.hand of man.