Alton Dooley

Alton Dooley

Apr 11, 2016

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The mastodon that started it all

This project started out as an effort to understand Max, a partial mastodon skeleton from Diamond Valley Lake in Hemet, CA (Max is on display at the Western Science Center). We temporarily removed Max's lower jaw from exhibit in order to examine some healed injuries, and while we had him out of his case we took measurements on his teeth. We expected the teeth to be huge, because Max is the largest mastodon known from California, but his teeth turned out to be rather small and very narrow. That started us looking at other California mastodons, and the project has snowballed from there.

Below is Max's lower jaw while he was off display (from https://valleyofthemastodon.wordpress.com/2015/08/...):

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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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