Students from SUNY Orange have been working to excavate ancient mastodon bones first discovered in 2024.
WAMC's Andrew Waite spoke with anthropology professor Cory Harris about the students' latest finds.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Editor's note: this conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Harris: This year, we were able to — I think one of the most kind of important things — is define the areas where there wasn't any mastodon left, at least in this cluster. I think that, at least the amount of animal that was in this particular immediate area, we found the boundaries of. And right now, primarily this year, we found lots of ribs, but there's a lot of ribs in the animal, and what may be some feet bones and some more vertebra, but some of that is waiting. Some more detailed cleaning and looking once we get it out of the field containers that we put them in to help maintain their integrity.
Waite: So basically, still putting the puzzle together here. This started in 2024, right? When somebody came, was it to your office, with a set of teeth?
Harris: Correct. Some local homeowners had found two teeth in their lawn, and they brought them to the college just to get some kind of verification and maybe guidance on what possible things to do next. And they encountered a number of people at the college. Before me, they encountered my colleague, a geologist, who knew I would also be really excited. So he brought them over to my office too, and he's been my partner in this project. We've both been leading students out for the excavation of it, at least.
Waite: What did you think when you first laid eyes on the teeth?
Harris: I think everybody knew exactly what they were when we saw them, but it was just exciting to see them for the first time, because I mean, I've seen them — we actually have a mounted mastodon here on the campus, so I've seen them many times — but seeing the discovery of them, it's just exciting. It's hard to to really put a label on it. It's just a great feeling.
Waite: Then in 2024, you started excavating, right? What was the the process from there? So you you have the teeth, you know that they belong to a mastodon that's 13,000 years old or whatever it is. Then what's the process from there? What happened from there?
Harris: That was exactly the question I had initially, because I'm trained in archeology, which is more about the ancient tools that people have left behind and not animals.
I mean, this is paleontology, so I actually reached out to the vertebrate paleontologist at the New York State Museum, Robert Feranec, and I sent him the pictures of the teeth. He immediately knew also what they were for sure, and he came down to the homeowner's property the next week. And a few of us went out there to meet him just to look around. And just right beneath the surface, under the lawn, two more teeth were popping out. So we knew there was more there, and this was October two years ago, so there wasn't a lot of time for kind of a real full project, so a small set of people went out and excavated one-by-one meter unit, which is about one-yard by one-yard, and we recovered a — it was not in the best shape, but just because of the conditions — but a full jaw with two teeth embedded in it, and so that was what started it. And we knew from that limited excavation there was almost assuredly more of the animal there, but we just needed to wait until the following summer to do a little bit more work on it.
Waite: Yeah, and then it turned out to be a pretty fruitful summer last summer, where more pieces came. So not only have you discovered more bones, you were mentioning a lot of a lot of ribs. You now feel like you have the boundaries of where the animal is?
Harris: At least this part of the animal, as you noted earlier, there's still a lot unknown. It takes a while to kind of ferret out all of the, if we can, all of the details of this, because there's a lot of pieces of this animal that weren't present.
Big bones like leg bones and tusks, pelvis, all of those things, which there's always the chance those just didn't happen to preserve. There, I mean, this mastodon was very close to the surface, unusually close to the ground surface, so it wasn't as protected as some as some other mastodon remains that have been recovered have been. There's also a very real possibility that — we're still trying to look through some historical information — more historic human activity may have moved parts of this mastodon elsewhere. Either agricultural activity or maybe it's currently in a suburban subdivision. So maybe in the process of clearing out that subdivision, something got pushed out. So we're still — us here at SUNY Orange, and then and also the New York State Museum staff — are still involved in doing some at least other probing in the immediate areas around to see if we can find other clusters of bone.
Waite: What are you hoping to learn? Like, why is this worthwhile?
Harris: I would say there're two things.
It's worthwhile just to have more information about our ancient, the natural history of our our region around here. It tells us about — it's one more piece of data.
One of the things that gets annoying if you teach in archeology or paleontology is those headlines about 'this will rewrite the textbooks.' Nothing ever rewrites the textbooks. Or generally, it doesn't. It adds a new wrinkle. It adds a little bit more data, and I mean that's fascinating in and of itself because it gives us more information about how biological communities react to climate change. Because it was definitely a time of natural climate change during that period.
I would say too, that the New York State Museum staff is definitely taking the lead on the straight up science of it. They've got some resources that they can devote to that that we don't here at SUNY Orange.
The second thing that I'm most kind of excited and interested about here is we've been able to provide kind of a close to unique opportunity for students at our college that it's not normal for your average community college student to do excavation of an actual extinct elephant literally in the backyard of one of their neighbors.
