Over the
summer, Dr. Nigel Brush, Professor of Geology, has been kept busy identifying
various rocks, fossils, and human artifacts exposed by recent heavy rains and
flash floods here in NE Ohio. While
this summer’s heavy rains were not good for farmers, as well as some home
owners living near streams, it was a windfall for geologists and archaeologists
as nature accidentally revealed some of the ancient treasures buried beneath
the earth’s surface.
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| Mammoth tooth found at the Inn at Honey Run |
The fossil that has generated the greatest interest
was a mammoth tooth found by a twelve-year-old boy in a stream bed near the Inn
at Honey Run, located a few miles outside the town of Millersburg in Holmes
County. Nigel confirmed that this large tooth was indeed a mammoth tooth. He
and Jeff Dilyard (a member of the Ashland/Wooster/Columbus Archaeological and
Geologic Consortium) subsequently visited the Inn to examine the tooth and the
find location. With permission from the Inn owner, Jason Niles, they surveyed
the stream bed and banks upstream from the find site, but found no additional
mammoth teeth or bones.
Two types of
mammoth lived in Ohio during the Ice Age: Woolly Mammoth and Jefferson Mammoth.
These mammoths had four large teeth (two upper and two lower). As the ridges on
each tooth wore down by grinding grasses and small seeds, the tooth was shoved
forward in the jaw by a new tooth until the old tooth fell out. Over their
lifetime of 60-80 years, a mammoth would have six complete sets of teeth.
Therefore, a single mammoth might lose some 20 teeth before developing its
final set of teeth.
Another member
of the elephant family that lived in Ohio during the Ice Age was the American
Mastodon. Mastodons were slightly smaller than mammoths and had pointed cusps
on their teeth rather than ridges. These two different tooth types represent
two different diets: mammoths
were grazers,
while mastodons were browsers, eating a greater variety of vegetation such as leaves
and twigs from bushes. Mastodons are more common in eastern North America while
mammoth are more abundant in the Great Plains and West – although their ranges overlapped.
Therefore, finding a mammoth tooth in Ohio tends to generate a bit more
interest than that of a mastodon.
The relative
scarcity of mammoth teeth in Ohio, as well as the human interest component of a
young boy finding the tooth, led to a lot of press coverage. The story first
appeared in the Holmes County Farmer Hub and the Wooster
Daily Record, and then other newspapers in Cleveland, Columbus, and
elsewhere, including the New York Daily News. After that, the story appeared on
television news stations in Cleveland and Youngstown, and finally made its way
into national and international news by way of CBS
News, CNN,
and Apple News. Dr. Brush said it was quite a lot of press exposure for
spending about a minute looking at a picture of a tooth and confirming it was
from a mammoth.
Left, a mammoth or mastodon tusk from Richland County.
Right, a mammoth tooth found in Fairfield County.
Following the
Holmes County discovery, Nigel received a photo from another Consortium member,
Jerry Ball, of a large piece of mammoth or mastodon tusk that had recently been
found in a gravel pit in Richland County. He was also given photos of a mammoth
tooth that were recently sent to Dr. Greg Wiles at the College of Wooster. A woman in Lancaster, Fairfield County, had
found this tooth in a stream bed there some eight years ago. The tooth had been
rounded and eroded as it was washed downstream. Since there is no flat grinding
surface on the tooth, it may have only been starting to erupt when the mammoth
died – note
