Alton Dooley

Alton Dooley

Jul 08, 2016

Group 6 Copy 41
0

Third stop - Boonshoft Museum of Discovery

This morning we made our third data collection stop, at the Boonshoft Museum of Discovery in Dayton, Ohio. The Boonshoft has a small but significant collection of fossils accumulated over the museum's greater than 100-year history. For our purposes, the highlight is a beautiful mastodon skull from Dayton:

This skull is from a subadult or young adult animal, with M1 and M2 in wear but M3 only partially erupted. There is a mandible to go with the cranium:

...as well as postcranial elements, including both femora. This is one of the relatively rare specimens that will allow us to compare tooth size to body size, although it would be even better if the M3s had erupted. 

There were several isolated teeth as well, including this 5-loph m3 from Dayton:

An intriguing specimen is this m3 that unfortunately did not have any locality information:

This is a very small tooth that in size and shape closely resembles a California tooth. What's especially tantalizing is that Boonshoft has a small number of specimen from Rancho La Brea that were collected in the 1920s or 1930s, and this tooth has residue adhering to it that looks a lot like tar pit sediment. Without data I can't be sure, but I suspect this looks like a California tooth because it actually is from California!

All told, today we examined 17 teeth from 8 individual mastodons, although 4 of the teeth had no locality data, plus the 2 femora associated with the skull. Tomorrow we visit our next museum.

0 comments

Join the conversation!Sign In

About This Project

American mastodons lived all across North America during the Ice Age. Paleontologists long suspected that western mastodons differed in subtle ways from eastern ones, and our initial data suggest they may have been distinctive in size and tooth proportions. We plan to examine various museum collections to build a robust database of mastodon measurements, allowing us to document regional population differences and helping us understand ecosystem variation and animal dispersal during the Ice Age.

Blast off!

Browse Other Projects on Experiment

Related Projects

Urban Pollination: sustain native bees & urban crops

Bee activity on our crop flowers is crucial to human food security, but bees are also declining around the...

Wormfree World - Finding New Cures

Hookworms affect the lives of more than 400,000,000 men, women and children around the world. The most effective...

Viral Causes of Lung Cancer

We have special access to blood specimens collected from more than 9,000 cancer free people. These individuals...

Backer Badge Funded

Add a comment