Alton Dooley

Alton Dooley

Jul 07, 2016

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Second stop: Cincinnati Museum of Natural History

After leaving Baton Rouge, Brett and I (accompanied by Max the Mastodon) headed north to our second data collection stop: the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History

The Overmyer mastodon from Indiana is one of the premier CMNH mastodons. This specimen has actually been published, so much of the data we needed was already available, but we were able to get measurements on postcranial bones (such as the femur below) and photos of the lower teeth.

All told, we took measurements on 2 femora and 19 teeth, although 6 of the teeth have limited locality information. Several of the teeth were quite large, although none were as big as the monster tooth from Baton Rouge we saw on Tuesday.

The lower jaw from Ohio shown above has heavily worn (and relatively small) third molars, and the second molars have been lost and the sockets are grown over. This all indicates a very elderly animal, one of the oldest I've seen.

There was a particularly intriguing tooth from Kentucky:

This is a lower third molar with five distinct lophs (the enamel ridges on the crown), instead of the usual four. It's also a very narrow tooth. I haven't yet graphed it, but it's going to have a length:width ratio in the same range as California teeth, but it's much longer than any California tooth (almost as long as the Baton Rouge tooth). We've only seen a handful of teeth with "California-style" proportions that didn't come from California.

This is the heaviest part of our trip, with three museums in three days. I'll do my best to get posts up as rapidly as I can!

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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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