West Michigan’s mastodon discovery exciting for researchers, community

KENT COUNTY, MI — Cory Redman rigorously opened a black plastic trash bag and pushed down the perimeters, revealing an enormous jawbone with golf ball sized tooth nonetheless hooked up.

The bone is from a juvenile mastodon that roamed West Michigan some 12,000 years in the past.

Redman and others not too long ago helped dig it from the bottom, together with about 40-60 % of all the animal’s bones, in northern Kent County.

It’s a discovery making a buzz amongst each researchers and the general public.

“I’m actually enthusiastic about it as a result of I’m a curator with a background in paleontology, so it doesn’t take a lot to get me excited a couple of fossil or extinct animal,” stated Redman, science curator for the Grand Rapids Public Museum. “But it surely’s actually cool that so many different persons are simply as enthusiastic about it if no more than me. That’s actually enjoyable.”

Redman and one other museum employee have been busy Thursday, Aug. 18 with efforts to rigorously clear after which bag the bones for drying. The drying course of will take months, probably as much as a 12 months.

The bones have been found by a development crew changing a drainage culvert on 22 Mile Street, north of Kent Metropolis. An excavator operator observed one thing reddish within the soil and staff rapidly discovered huge bones they knew didn’t belong to livestock.

Mastodon bones found throughout West Michigan street challenge work

College of Michigan analysis specialist Scott Beld drove to the positioning and labored with Redman and others to rigorously take away bones from a mucky space after which bag them.

The excavation website was simply off the street and in a subject. The property proprietor agreed to donate the bones, with U of M securing analysis rights however permitting the bones to be housed on the Grand Rapids Public Museum.

Mastodons have been giant elephant-like creatures that weighed 5 to eight tons as adults and had lengthy, shaggy hair. They have been just like wooly mammoths however barely smaller with shorter legs.

Mastodons went extinct about 11,700 years in the past with the Ice Age.

Redman stated researchers consider the mastodon discovered close to Kent Metropolis didn’t die in that location, however the bones seemingly have been washed there by water. The animal might have been 10 to twenty years outdated at dying.

It’s not clear how the mastodon perished, however Redman and College of Michigan researchers intend to search for any proof of lower marks on the bones.

Mastodons and people lived on the identical time and researchers know that some have been killed with instruments.

In Michigan mastodon bones are periodically discovered. Redman figured somebody makes a discovery each three to 5 years, on common.

The Grand Rapids Public Museum, actually, has bones from two different mastodons in its collections. One is known as “Smitty” and was present in Grandville within the Nineteen Eighties. The opposite, referred to as the “Moorland” mastodon was present in 1904 in Moorland, north of Ravenna in Muskegon County.

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