Professor recovers mastodon bones

Matstodons became extinct about 10,000 years ago.

ROSSBURG, Ohio (AP) — A minute’s walk from the only stoplight in this western Ohio town, a dozen men, women and children delicately dig and sift through the dirt in a small pasture.

“Just 8 inches down is 12,000 years old,” said Tom Kitchen, a West Jefferson Middle School teacher and occasional volunteer here.

At that depth, dozens of volunteers, led by Ohio State University geology professor Dale Gnidovec, have spent the past five summers uncovering the Darke County mastodon.

“I thought we were done, but we had a backhoe out here, scraping off an inch at a time around the perimeter of all we’d dug by hand,” Gnidovec said. “He uncovered four more bones.”

That was late September.

Three weeks later, the backhoe uncovered two more bones. Gnidovec estimates that he and his crew members have uncovered about half the skeleton, scattered in no apparent pattern just beneath the surface.

He’s not sure whether to dig deeper or wider; maybe both, maybe neither.

Gnidovec, curator of the Orton Museum of Natural History at Ohio State, still gets excited each time he kneels down and starts pushing a trowel into the ground, wondering what he might find next.

But he’s thinking of calling it quits. “I’m a little tired of the drive.”

Gnidovec did not unearth anything new — mastodons are the most common ice-age remains found in Ohio. He said he kept the dig going to teach people interested in fossils how to tread into prehistory.

About $1,000 in donations covered costs for tools and supplies.

“They can learn some skills and, in the future, if they make a discovery on their own, they’ll know more about the proper way to recover material and the ethics of excavating,” said Martha Otto, curator of archaeology at the Ohio Historical Society.

Otto said human remains must be left alone, that property owners own fossils and artifacts found on their land and that when anything is dug up, evidence of the past has been disturbed.

This dig had its start in December 2002, when Gnidovec took a phone call from farmer Henry Post, who’d bought the land and smacked an odd-looking bone with his plow.

Gnidovec said he gets a lot of phone calls like this one. Most of the time, the finds are cow or horse bones.

He asked Post to bring in what he’d found.

“That’s a mastodon tooth,” he told Post. “An adult, but not old.”

Mastodons, which stood about 9 feet at the shoulder and weighed 4 to 5 tons, roamed forest fringes and marshes in Ohio from at least 3.5 million years ago to about 10,000 years ago, when they became extinct.

The animal lived on a diet of leaves and twigs and was shorter and bulkier than its grass-gazing cousin, the woolly mammoth.

“A mammoth is a kind of elephant,” Gnidovec said. “A mastodon is a much older species, a third cousin once removed. It was a fossil in its own time.”

Post sold the land to the local fire department, which has allowed Gnidovec to keep digging.

The department is considering donating at least some of the bones to Orton and keeping some for a display.

Neighbor Leon Kissinger moved in shortly before the first shovel turned the ground.

“I’m told this was a swampy area, that it was never farmed until it was sold to Henry Post,” Kissinger said.

Kissinger put a small shed on the property so Gnidovec can leave tools and necessities instead of hauling them to town each weekend.

He also mows the area, pumps out standing water that forms when it rains and brings lemonade to the site on hot days.

His grandchildren have helped on the dig.

“A lot of people get to do something they never did before,” Kissinger said.

On some days, Gnidovec and Steve Krichbaum, a rock hound and supervisor with the state fire marshal’s office, are the only diggers.

But on some afternoons, the site teems with 40 second-graders who get a lecture and a turn in the dirt.

To find bones, diggers look for an orange tint in the dirt as they lower the elevation by half-inches. The bones aren’t petrified, but they are light, fragile and, except for their pores, resemble the dirt that entombed them.

The mastodon’s kneecap is about the size of a grapefruit; a toe bone covers half a woman’s size 8 shoe. A humerus and femur are both about a yard long.

Sisters Josie Tiberi, 8, and Anna, 10, of New Albany, spent a recent Saturday morning sifting through the dirt. They found several bone fragments.

They went to the site with their mother, Jen, and grandmother, Gwynne Campbell, after hearing Gnidovec speak at Orton. Others volunteered after hearing Gnidovec speak at rock or paleontology clubs across the state.

“It was one of the best things I’ve done with my girls,” Jen Tiberi said.

When someone finds a bone, they are taught to painstakingly scrape and brush away dirt to expose the top and some of the sides.

Then they dig a circle in the dirt around the bone.

“Most Ice-Age bones can be picked up and carried off, but these are too fragmentary,” Gnidovec said.

Over the ages, weather and plant roots have taken a toll, so the diggers use a technique used on much older dinosaur bones. They cast the bones and the dirt beneath them in plaster of Paris before removing them.

Krichbaum and Lisa Hilficker, a quality-control manager from Marysville, cleaned the surface of what appeared to be a vertebra. The section stretched as long as a man’s forearm.

Meanwhile, Kitchen and fellow teacher Eric Humphries worked on a fragile rib bone that had been cast in plaster.

The rib and vertebra were carried to Gnidovec’s car and now are in a storage room at Ohio State.