Mastodon bones cleaned by Grand Rapids Public Museum

KENT COUNTY, MI -- Cory Redman carefully opened a black plastic trash bag and pushed down the sides, revealing a huge jawbone with golf ball sized teeth still attached.

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

Redman and others recently helped dig it from the ground, along with about 40-60 percent of the entire animal’s bones, in northern Kent County.

It’s a discovery creating a buzz among both researchers and the public.

“I’m really excited about it because I’m a curator with a background in paleontology, so it doesn’t take much to get me excited about a fossil or extinct animal,” said Redman, science curator for the Grand Rapids Public Museum. “But it’s really cool that so many other people are just as excited about it if not more than me. That’s really fun.”

Redman and another museum worker were busy Thursday, Aug. 18 with efforts to carefully clean and then bag the bones for drying. The drying process will take months, possibly up to a year.

The bones were discovered by a construction crew replacing a drainage culvert on 22 Mile Road, north of Kent City. An excavator operator noticed something reddish in the soil and workers quickly found massive bones they knew did not belong to farm animals.

Related: Mastodon bones discovered during West Michigan road project work

University of Michigan research specialist Scott Beld drove to the site and worked with Redman and others to carefully remove bones from a mucky area and then bag them.

The excavation site was just off the road and in a field. The property owner agreed to donate the bones, with U of M securing research rights but allowing the bones to be housed at the Grand Rapids Public Museum.

Mastodons were large elephant-like creatures that weighed five to eight tons as adults and had long, shaggy hair. They were similar to wooly mammoths but slightly smaller with shorter legs.

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

Redman said researchers believe the mastodon found near Kent City did not die in that location, but the bones likely were washed there by water. The animal may have been 10 to 20 years old at death.

It’s not clear how the mastodon perished, but Redman and University of Michigan researchers intend to look for any evidence of cut marks on the bones.

Mastodons and humans lived at the same time and researchers know that some were killed with tools.

In Michigan mastodon bones are periodically found. Redman figured someone makes a discovery every three to five years, on average.

The Grand Rapids Public Museum, in fact, has bones from two other mastodons in its collections. One is named “Smitty” and was found in Grandville in the 1980s. The other, called the “Moorland” mastodon was found in 1904 in Moorland, north of Ravenna in Muskegon County.

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