MHC Volunteers Help Uncover Mastodon Skeleton

Mount Holyoke students Bryn Powell '01 (center) and April Duckworth '03 far right) at the big dig.

Last November, Diane Kelly, an expert on vertebrae morphology and a visiting assistant professor of biological sciences at MHC, received the sort of call many paleontologists wait entire careers for. Friends from the Paeleontological Research Institute (PRI) in Ithaca, New York, were phoning with a mastodon alert. Suspicious bones had turned up in a suburbanite's backyard pond in Hyde Park, New York, which just happens to be Kelly’s hometown. In late August, PRI set up camp, and Kelly drove down to assist. Luckily for a group of Mount Holyoke women, she needed a hand.

Her recruits, including twelve volunteers from MHC, were in for more than a few surprises. “It was one of the most amazing experiences,” said Laurel Moulton '01. “In addition to finding tusk fragments, I uncovered two bones. Each one was as long and twice as thick as my forearm.” The enormous scale of the pieces amazed even Kelly, an expert at bone identification. “The tiniest bones in the foot were this big,” she says holding her hands four inches apart. “They’re about the size and shape of a squash ball. I found I identified them most accurately when I felt them beneath the mud first.” The cold, sticky “glacial mud” created a general challenge, and by the end of the day the volunteers were not only covered from head to toe, said Kelly, but chilled in their feet and legs. Volunteers were barefoot so as not to crush the bones below, and their feet served as helpful feelers.

“I tried to warn them about the mud,” said Kelly, recounting the two weekends of digging as she caught up on work in her Clapp Laboratory office during her first Mountain Day. She explained that the excavation site was located in a kettle bog formed by glacial melt. Though it was drained for the work, water from natural springs released a constant flow into the clay. Even with mechanical pumps, it was impossible to keep the area dry. The MHC students—along with groups of volunteers from several other New England colleges—were given the task of removing the heavy clay “matrix” (the sludgy mix of mud and organisms such as snails) bucket by bucket.

Submerged to her waist, Anna Lincoln '01 worked for hours beside an exposed tusk, the idea of which she found “very distracting.” The enormous pelvis of the mastodon, the first bone uncovered in the pond, lay beneath a tarp at the bottom of the pit. The skull sat in a nearby garage. “It was a wonderful experience,” says Lincoln. “Only at Mount Holyoke could an economics major go digging for mastodons!” Kelly agreed that the trip provided an extraordinary and rare educational experience for MHC students. They worked side by side with professional paleontologists and geologists and witnessed a significant portion of the excavation process, from the pond-draining and the building of a wooden pallet bridge to the pond’s center, to “coring” samples of earth for analysis, to measuring, photographic documentation, mapping, grid making, and exhuming the specimens. They even helped build boxes for shipping the bones to Cornell University, where they will be examined.

The experience also inspired much speculation as to how a large mastodon, cousin to the elephant, might have ambled onto precariously thin ice thousands of years ago and crashed through the icy depths. The creature's huge corpus settled and shifted through the eons. It was ultimately enshrined in perfect bone-preserving, oxygen-deficient glacial clay until last summer, when Larry Lozier, a twenty-first century Homo sapien, decided to dredge and deepen his backyard pond in the middle of American suburbia. The story of Lozier's extraordinary find has been well documented in the New York Times and other publications, and Lozier has donated the remains to Cornell. (In exchange he has modestly requested that his yard be restored to its original state.)

Kelly and the MHC students commented on the generosity of Lozier, who fed and assisted the crew. Kelly’s students also enjoyed the overnight hospitality of the professor’s mother, who lives in Hyde Park. Kelly, who is teaching comparative biomechanics after recently completing postdoctoral work at Cornell, said her MHC courses focus on using the principles of mechanical engineering to look at animals and plants. Her own specialized area of focus is the reproductive organs of male animals, and she has done extensive writing and speaking on the armadillo in particular.