“How Old Do You Think That Mastodon Is?”

 

I am incredibly excited to announce that after 42 years since its initial discovery, the Aptos Mastodon, Mammut sp., on exhibit at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History, will be formally getting C-14 dated in the coming weeks! Discovered in a creekbed by then-high school student James Stanton, who was searching for antique bottles in the water just after the heavy storm surge of 1980, the skull has been on exhibit at the museum for the past 40 years. Fast forward to this week and the bone and plant samples, once I get them cleaned with distilled water of any attached sediment or other materials sticking to them, will be sent off to NOSAMS the National Ocean Sciences Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Lab, which is a part of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution!  The three samples will consist of a fragment of the bone from the inside of the mastodon’s skull, called pneumatic bone due to its looking like swiss cheese, an exterior fragment of skull bone, and a piece of carbonized wood that was discovered in contact with the bone around the skull all those years ago.  Specimens need to be younger than 50,000 years before present in order for the C-14 process to work, anything older and an indeterminate age is assigned.  Back in 1980, during the reconstruction of the mastodon’s skull, the two largest pieces of its skull were painstakingly reunited over a two-year period, with hundreds of fragments leftover from the process.  In true museum detective story fashion, the box that all the fragments were stored in remained unaccounted for over the past 3 years, until I was contacted last week with the amazing news that the box, untouched since I packed it away 40 years ago (see pics below), had been discovered once again!  The river gravels that the skull was preserved in, an incredibly rare process, have never been absolutely dated, only relatively dated.  What this means is that we might be able to assign an exact age to the mastodon and river sediments, if they are younger than 50,000 years old, instead of having a rough estimate of their age based on other rock layers nearby.  And if the mastodon samples come back with an indeterminate age, that is also important information, for then we will be able to say that the sediments, and the mastodon, are older than 50k!  And for those of you who may be wondering why in the world would the inside of a mastodon’s skull look like swiss cheese, well it has to do with biomechanics.  All proboscideans; mammoths, mastodons, and elephants, have pneumatic bone (see sample pic below), or skull bone with large “air pockets” in it rather than solid bone due to it being much lighter than solid skull bone and yet still strong.  Think of all that weight that the proboscidean has to hold up and out; so the lighter the better!   Stay tuned in the coming weeks after the tests come back to learn… the rest of the story!

https://www.santacruzmuseum.org/ 

http://www.jstantonphotography.com/-home.html 

https://www2.whoi.edu/site/nosams/ 

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