The Warren Mastodon
About 11,000 years old
Among the mammoths and giant ground sloths of the fourth floor stands an elephant like animal with long, gently curving tusks and a low, heavy skull. It is a mastodon, a cousin of the elephants that browsed the forests of North America until about eleven thousand years ago, and this individual is the most famous of its kind. It is nearly complete, missing only a few small bones, and it stands as it was found, in the bones of an animal that lived in the Hudson Valley just north of New York City at the end of the last Ice Age.
Compare it with the mammoth nearby. The mastodon is lower and stockier, with a flatter skull and a longer body, and its teeth are the key difference: instead of the washboard grinding plates of a mammoth, its molars have blunt cone shaped cusps for crushing twigs and leaves. The name mastodon means breast tooth, a reference to those cusps. The tusks on this specimen are original and unusually long. Look at the heavy leg bones and the broad feet, built for soft forest floors rather than open grassland.
The skeleton was dug from a bog near Newburgh in Orange County, New York, in 1845 and bought by the Boston anatomist John Collins Warren, who described it in a monograph and displayed it in his own museum. The American Museum acquired it in 1906 with help from the banker J. P. Morgan. It has stood in these halls ever since, and it remains one of the finest mastodon skeletons ever found.
Did You Know? When it was found in 1845, a mass of crushed twigs was discovered where the animal's stomach had been, showing what it ate on its last day.
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