Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 37, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 May 1905 — A Mammoth Tooth This Time [ARTICLE]

A Mammoth Tooth This Time

Most of the readers of this paper are familiar with the fact that the finding in the muck lands in this region of teeth and sometimes bones of enormous extinot animals of the elephant species is of comparatively frequent ocourenoe. So far, however, as the facts have come to our knowledge, all these finds in this immediate region have been mastodon teeth, and not mammoth’s. The two animals were much alike, though probably differing fully as muoh in outward build, and more perhaps in the kind of food they preferred than a horse differs from a donkey, or a sheep from a goat. For one thing the mammoth al* ways seems to have bad long woolly hair, while the mastodon had to get along with about as much of that commodity as a modern elephant. Furthermore the male mammoth had immensely long aud beautifully ourved tusks, while the mastodon seems only to have had short and ugly appliances of that kind, The mammoth was principally a northern animal aud the mastodon a southern, but their ranges sometimes overlapped, and no doubt an occasional mammoth was some-

times seen along with the big droves of mastodons that used to roam over the region of whioh Jasper county is now a part, long ages before there were any men here to molest or make them afraid or to round up and put their brands on the yearling mavericks of either speoies. All of whioh by way of introduction to the fact that a huge molar tooth that once did business and plenty of it, in the jaws of a mammoth, was brought to town last Satuiday by Robert J. Yeoman, of the west part of Newton township. He pioked it up from the freshly thrown out banks of the dredge ditch now being excavated down Ourtis Creek. Tne tooth is in an excellent state of preservation, is three inches wide by six long, on its grinding surface and weighs 5 pounds. Which is no dcubt considerably more than it weighed when the owner had it, owing to Sbme of the more perishable parts having been fossilized or turned to stone. The tx>th is now on exhibition at Fendig’s drug store. Mr. Yeoman did not make any sea.'oh for any other possible re mains of the mammoth, whioh might be a good thing to do, as possibly more of the teeth or tv an paits of the tusks or bones may be found there.