Alton Dooley

Alton Dooley

Aug 08, 2016

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The project continues

A few weeks ago we completed the Mastodons of Unusual Size road trip, but that doesn't mean that the project has come to a close, or even that we've completed data collection. We still have more mastodons to measure, even here in California.

Over the last week, Dr. Katy Smith from Georgia Southern University visited WSC to measure mastodon tusks in our collection. The Diamond Valley Lake fossils were transferred to WSC almost 10 years ago, and for the transfer the half-prepared jackets were wrapped in foam and plastic. Many of them are still in that state, unopened over the last decade. For Dr. Smith's visit, we opened several of these jackets to expose the tusks, which also gave us the opportunity to measure the teeth.

Over the last week we added an additional 17 California teeth to our dataset, mostly upper 2nd and 3rd molars. Here's and example of one of the newly-examined skulls, with anterior toward the top and both M2s and the left M3 visible at the bottom:

 

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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!

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