Alton Dooley

Alton Dooley

May 09, 2016

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Data collection underway

We're closing out our crowdfunding campaign in the next couple of days, and hopefully we'll have enough support to move forward (remember, this is an all-or-nothing campaign). But even at this point, some data collection is underway. Of course, we've already started gathering data from published sources and from specimens at the Cooper Center and the Western Science Center, where Eric and I work respectively. But as it happens I'm currently in Virginia on family business, and that gave me a chance to stop at the Virginia Museum of Natural History. There are a handful mastodon specimens from the Saltville, VA locality housed there, including the lower first molar shown below, which have now been measured and photographed, and are being added to our dataset.

Please help us get the word out about our project to as many people as possible over the next 24 hours!

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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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