Mastodon

It’s not often that you find the remains of a prehistoric animal right in your own backyard. That’s what happened on the Stephen Christensen farm near Greenfield, Indiana, in 1976. As a crane operator used his machinery to create a pond from a shallow bog, he accidentally scooped up the skull, teeth, and some rib bones of a mastodon, an extinct relative of the modern elephant that roamed Indiana more than 10,000 years ago!

 

Ronald Stubbe, the farmer’s nephew, recalls thinking that the mastodon was “so big, I was sure it wasn’t nothing local.” The property owner halted the work and contacted the chair of the Geology Department in the Purdue School of Sciences at IUPUI.

 

The actual excavation was a joint effort of IUPUI faculty and students, the Indianapolis Amateur Archaeology Association, and Children’s Museum staff and volunteers, and yielded approximately 450 bones and fragments, which were gifted to the Indiana University Foundation. In 1978, the skeleton was transferred to the collection of The Children’s Museum, where it has been on constant display ever since.