Mastodon Remains Emerging From Nevada Desert

GARDNERVILLE, Nev. —  Time and archeological grave robbers are finally taking their toll on a prehistoric gem that has withstood millions of years of geologic upheaval.

Within a month of the chance discovery of the fossilized remains of a mastodon in late March and before excavation could begin, looters had moved in, taking some artifacts and damaging others.

Tom Lugaski, director of the W.M. Keck Museum at the University of Nevada, Reno, is optimistic they left the best stuff behind.

“It’s like Christmastime with all these packages around here,” he said as the dig got underway at the end of April.

To his right, a pile of crushed ribs bore testimony to the work of vandals. But to his left, some 20 scientists, students and volunteers picked and chipped around the partially exposed leg of the creature, which roamed what was then a marshy western Nevada some 3 million to 3.5 million years ago.

The surprising find was made at the end of March by two teenagers who were riding motorcycles in the steep and rocky canyons of the Pine Nut Mountains.

Derek Prosser and Dustin Turner not only recognized the object sticking out of the rock as a large bone, but reported their find to the federal Bureau of Land Management.

Prosser, 18, said he had seen enough bones to know these weren’t just an outcropping of rock, especially when he spotted the crystallized marrow.

“After taking a close look, it kind of shocked me. I knew it was something very unusual,” he said.

The boys took some specimens to the bureau.

“They did everything exactly right. We’re lucky they found the bones and even luckier they reported it,” the bureau’s historical archeologist, Gary Bowyer, said. The find is on BLM-administered land.

Despite the rugged remoteness of the site, word leaked out of its whereabouts and there have been signs of nonscientific exploration, Bowyer said. That put pressure on the experts to interrupt their Easter weekend before there was any lasting damage.

“This is an emergency excavation,” he said.

Using tools ranging from pressure bars to hammers and chisels to soft brushes, workers hunkered down in a pit about 10 feet in diameter to remove the fairly soft sandstone from around the buried bone.

“We have the front leg, from the shoulder down to the foot,” Lugaski said. “At this point, we don’t know if there is any more that we can see. It would be nice if we could find the whole thing, but they die and disintegrate.”

He said the foreleg alone is a rich reward.

“Most often, you’ll get a piece of tooth, a piece of leg bone. A whole front leg starts to get fairly rare. What’s important is they’re finding more and more pieces of it.”

A fist-sized chunk of skull and the fragments of rib bones leave Lugaski optimistic that more work will unearth discoveries that range beyond just the leg.

“Hopefully there’ll be some more out there. It could be scattered over hundreds of feet. You never know,” Lugaski said.

The dig is on hold until workers remove dirt and rocks that the centuries have deposited in the rocky canyon uphill from the excavation.

The area already has yielded remains of camels, horses and extinct bears, which help establish the date of the American mastodon as being at the upper end of the species’ reign in North America. They first appeared about 3.75 million years ago and abruptly disappeared 10,000 years ago at the beginning of the Ice Age.

A youngster had little trouble gathering ancient non-mastodon teeth but walking off with archeological trophies can bring a stiff fine.

The site, now almost exactly one mile above sea level, originally was some 700 feet lower and was much wetter, since the Sierra was still forming and Pacific storms could easily cross into the valley, according to Pat Cashman, an associate professor of geology at UNR.

The climate encouraged the growth of shrubs and small trees in great enough abundance to keep the elephant-like animals well fed.

“They’d clear off this whole hillside in no time today,” Cashman said, gesturing toward the spotty growth of juniper and sagebrush.

Mastodons were smaller than their relatives the mammoths, and were squatter and longer than modern elephants, averaging 6 to 10 feet at the shoulder and 15 feet from the root of the tusks to the start of the tail. They were covered by coarse, reddish-brown hair.

The age of this mastodon makes it a rare find but also makes radioactive carbon dating impossible, since that is accurate only to about 500,000 years, according to UNR graduate student Tom Mantean. Other dating methods and fossilized material around the excavation will make more accurate dating possible as the remains are studied in greater detail.

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On the Net:

The W.M. Keck Museum:

https://mines.unr.edu/museum