Alton Dooley

Alton Dooley

Jul 05, 2016

Group 6 Copy 29
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Data collection began today!

After driving east from California (and seeing some cool geology along the way!), Brett and I made our first data collection stop today, at Louisiana State University. I received my Ph.D. from LSU way back in 1998, and this was only the second time since then that I've been on campus. My graduate advisor, Judith Schiebout, is still at LSU, and Ting Suyin who was a graduate student at LSU at the same time I was there is now the Collections Manager there.

Brett and I measured and photographed 17 mastodon teeth in the LSU collections, although only 13 will go into our dataset; the others are too incompletely preserved to get a full set of reliable measurements. Of the 13 that we could measure, 4 are only provisionally included, because we're not certain where they're from (although they are most likely either from Louisiana or Mississippi). The other 9 teeth, which include upper second and third molars and lower third molars, are all from Louisiana and have good age and locality data.

All of the teeth we measured today have length to width ratios that look very much like teeth from elsewhere in the southeast and the midwest (the proportions are similar to published data from Indiana, Florida, and Kentucky, for example). But one thing that struck me was the huge size of some of the teeth. One specimen in particular, from a Baton Rouge locality, included an upper M2 and a lower m3 that are apparently from the same individual:

These teeth are absolutely enormous! The m3 is the second longest m3 in our database so far (and I haven't confirmed the measurement on the only one that's larger), and the M2 at 117.7 mm wide is the only M2 we've measured that's more than 100 mm wide; in fact, no California mastodon tooth in ANY tooth position is as wide as this M2!

I was especially pleased to get to include another of the Louisiana specimens in our data set:

Brett's holding an M3 and maxilla fragment from the Angola, Louisiana mastodon. This one is near and dear to my heart because it is the only mastodon I've ever personally excavated. In the summer of 1994, early in my graduate school career, Brett and I returned to Baton Rouge after our honeymoon and almost immediately had to go to the Louisiana State Penitentiary to recover this specimen, which had been discovered during a construction project at the prison (besides being the only mastodon I've ever collected, it's the only time I've ever led an excavation inside a prison!). The specimen was prepared after I graduated, and today was the first time either Brett or I had seen it since 1994.

Our next stop is in a few days, at the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History. Besides the lab notes here, I'm also posting updates at the museum's blog (valleyofthemastodon.wordpress.com), and you can also follow Max on Twitter (@MaxMastodon) for more frequent updates.

Note: Edited to correct some data errors.

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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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