Mastodon Fossils Discovered At Daytona Beach

Prehistoric animal bones found at a Daytona Beach construction site have been confirmed as belonging to a mastodon, officials at the local Museum of Arts and Sciences confirmed on Tuesday.

According to reports by both WESH.com and The Daytona Beach News Journal, the bones were discovered by crews working on a storm water retention pond near Nova Road. The construction site was closed down in order to preserve the fossils — a jawbone, some vertebrae, two tusks, pieces of femur and some additional bones belonging to the large-tusked, Ice Age-era mammal.

“We’re finding some significant pieces — tusks and vertebrae. We don’t know completely what’s down there yet, so it gets more exciting the more we dig,” Museum of Arts and Sciences representative Zach Zacharias told WESH on Wednesday.

Officials from the museum added that they did not know as of that time whether or not there was a single partial skeleton, a full set of remains, or bones from multiple creatures located at the fossil site. However, they said that they kept finding more and more bones at the retention pond’s location, and they believe that they are between 13,000 and 150,000 years old.

Officials from the museum added that they did not know as of that time whether or not there was a single partial skeleton, a full set of remains, or bones from multiple creatures located at the fossil site. However, they said that they kept finding more and more bones at the retention pond’s location, and they believe that they are between 13,000 and 150,000 years old.

“If the bone fragments add up to a full skeleton, it would only be about the 13th such find in Florida, according to a top official with the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville,” Daytona Beach News Journal Staff Writer Eileen Zaffiro-Kean wrote on November 23.

“It’s not extremely rare, but it’s not common, either,” that official, vertebrate paleontology expert Richard Hulbert, told Zaffiro-Kean. After seeing pictures of the jaw and bone fragments via email, Hulbert said that the specimen “definitely looks like an American mastodon… The size and nature of the teeth are very distinctive. It looks pretty nice. It’s definitely of scientific interest.”

The News Journal notes that since the fossils were found on city property, the city owns them. Hulbert said that he would come to assist at the site if the city were willing to donate the fossils to his museum, and pledged his long-distance assistance should they decline to do so, Zaffiro-Kean said.

“Museum officials, who are being aided by a local amateur paleontologist, are making most of their discoveries on one end of the site. They’re worried about people drifting in and taking souvenirs, and they’ve asked the media not to pinpoint the area where the retention ponds are being built by identifying nearby side streets and landmarks,” she added.

http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112429190/mastodon-fossils-discovered-at-daytona-beach/index.html

Mastodons were hunted in North America 800 years earlier than thought

Humans were killing large mammals in North America long before 'Clovis culture', study of mastodon remains suggests
Humans were hunting large mammals in North America about 800 years earlier than previously thought, new analysis of a controversial mastodon specimen – with what appears to be a spear tip in its rib – seems to confirm.

The find suggests humans were hunting mastodons using tools made from bone about a thousand years before the start of the "Clovis culture", reputedly the first human culture in North America. Other evidence points to mammoth hunting using stone tools around this time, but the notion of pre-Clovis hunting has remained highly controversial.

The mastodon was found in 1977 by a farmer called Emanuel Manis. He contacted archaeologist Carl Gustafson, who excavated the skeleton and noticed a pointed object embedded in its rib. Gustafson took a fuzzy x-ray and interpreted the object as a projectile point made of bone or antler.

By dating organic matter around the fossil, he estimated that it was about 14,000 years old. Other archaeologists challenged Gustafson's dates and his interpretation of the fragment as a man-made point.

Decades later Professor Michael Waters from Texas A&M University contacted him about re-examining the specimen using modern technology. His analysis was published on Thursday in the journal Science.

Waters placed the mastodon in an industrial-grade CT scanner at the University of Texas. "It's more powerful than a hospital one. They're taking slices every 0.06mm, half the thickness of a piece of paper," he says. "The 3D rendering clearly showed that the object was sharpened to a tip. It was clearly the end of a bone projectile point."

Waters analysed collagen protein from the mastodon's rib and tusks to confirm that the animal died about 13,800 years ago, almost exactly as Gustafson predicted.

He also extracted DNA from the rib and the spear point. Analysis showed that both belonged to a mastodon, suggesting the animal had been killed with a weapon fashioned from the remains of its own kind.

"It should certainly be considered as evidence of hunting. You're bending over backwards to explain it as something else," said Prof Daniel Fisher from the University of Michigan.

Two other sites in Wisconsin appear to show people were hunting woolly mammoths and using stone tools between 14,200 and 14,800 years ago. The Manis specimen suggests they also hunted mastodons and used bone tools.

Together, the three sites provide strong evidence for pre-Clovis hunting. "They're incontrovertible," said Waters. "Clearly, people were hunting mammoths and mastodons again and again, playing a part in their ultimate demise."

He believes the beasts probably succumbed to gradual hunting pressure from humans, rather than a quick "Clovis blitzkrieg".

Despite Waters's efforts, the fragment in the Manis mastodon's rib is still stoking debate. "It's not definitely proven that it is a projectile point," said Prof Gary Haynes from the University of Nevada, Reno. "Elephants today push each other all the time and break each other's ribs so it could be a bone splinter that the animal just rolled on.".

Waters does not credit this alternative hypothesis. "Ludicrous what-if stories are being made up to explain something people don't want to believe," he said. "We took the specimen to a bone pathologist, showed him the CT scans, and asked if there was any way it could be an internal injury. He said absolutely not."

Waters added: "If you break a bone, a splinter isn't going to magically rotate its way through a muscle and inject itself into your rib bone. Something needed to come at this thing with a lot of force to get it into the rib."

The spear thrower must have had a powerful arm, because the fragment would have punctured hair, skin and up to 30cm of mastodon muscle. "A bone projectile point is a really lethal weapon," said Waters. "It's sharpened to a needle point and little greater than the diameter of a pencil. It's like a bullet. It's designed to get deep into the elephant and hit a vital organ … I've seen these thrown through old cars."

What would it take to finally convince the sceptics? "I'm not going to dig my heels in and stonewall it," said Haynes. "If they yanked it out and showed that there are scraping marks and it's been polished and shaped, that would convince me."

Waters said he would not tamper with such an extraordinary specimen. "That would destroy it. I would be a pariah. It's unnecessary with modern technology. I could take 3D printers and recreate the object itself."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/oct/20/mastodon-hunted-north-america

After mastodons and mammoths, a transformed landscape

RIGHT: Mastodons graze on black ash trees in a pleistocene swamp. A new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows that the disappearance of North America’s large herbivores not long after the retreat of the ice sheets that covered much of the continent triggered a dramatic reshaping of the landscape. Illustration: Barry Roal Carlsen

Nov. 19, 2009
by Terry Devitt

Roughly 15,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, North America's vast assemblage of large animals — including such iconic creatures as mammoths, mastodons, camels, horses, ground sloths and giant beavers — began their precipitous slide to extinction.

And when their populations crashed, emptying a land whose diversity of large animals equaled or surpassed Africa's wildlife-rich Serengeti plains then or now, an entirely novel ecosystem emerged as broadleaved trees once kept in check by huge numbers of big herbivores claimed the landscape. Soon after, the accumulation of woody debris sparked a dramatic increase in the prevalence of wildfire, another key shaper of landscapes.

This new picture of the ecological upheaval of the North American landscape just after the retreat of the ice sheets is detailed in a study published today (Nov. 19) in the journal Science. The study, led by researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, uses fossil pollen, charcoal and dung fungus spores to paint a picture of a post-ice age terrain different from anything in the world today.

The work is important because it is "the clearest evidence to date that the extinction of a broad guild of animals had effects on other parts of these ancient ecosystems," says John W. Williams, a UW-Madison professor of geography and an expert on ancient climates and ecosystems who is the study's senior author. What's more, he says, the detailing of changes on the ice age landscape following the crash of keystone animal populations can provide critical insight into the broader effects of animals disappearing from modern landscapes.

The study was led by Jacquelyn Gill, a graduate student in Williams' lab. Other co-authors are Stephen T. Jackson of the University of Wyoming, Katherine B. Lininger of UW-Madison and Guy S. Robinson of Fordham University.

The new work, says Gill, informs but does not resolve the debate over what caused the extinction of 34 genera or groups of large animals, including icons of the ice age such as elephant like mastodons and ground sloths the size of sport utility vehicles. "Our data are not consistent with a rapid, 'blitzkrieg' overkill of large animals by humans," notes Gill, nor was their decline due to a loss of habitat.

However, the work does seem to rule out a recent hypothesis that a meteor or comet impact some 12.9 thousand years ago was responsible for the extinction of ice age North America's signature large animals.

The study was conducted using lake sediment cores obtained from Appleman Lake in Indiana, as well as data obtained previously by Robinson from sites in New York. Gill, Williams and their colleagues used pollen, charcoal and the spores of a dung fungus that requires passage through a mammalian intestinal tract to complete its life cycle to reconstruct a picture of sweeping change to the ice age environment. The decline of North America's signature ice age mammals was a gradual process, the Wisconsin researchers explain, taking about 1,000 years. The decline in the huge numbers of ice age animals is preserved in the fossil record when the fungal spores disappear from the record altogether: "About 13.8 thousand years ago, the number of spores drops dramatically. They're barely in the record anymore," Gill explains.

Like detectives reconstructing a crime scene, the group's use of dung fungus spores helps establish a precise sequence of events, showing that the crash of ice age megafauna began before plant communities started to change and before fires appeared widely on the landscape.

"The data suggest that the megafaunal decline and extinction began at the Appleman Lake site sometime between 14.8 thousand and 13.7 thousand years ago and preceded major shifts in plant community composition and the frequency of fire," notes Williams.

Absent the large herbivores that kept them in check, such tree species as black ash, elm and ironwood began to colonize a landscape dominated by coniferous trees such as spruce and larch. The resulting mix of boreal and temperate trees formed a plant community unlike any observed today.

"As soon as herbivores drop off the landscape, we see different plant communities," Gill explains, noting that mastodon herds and other large animals occupied a parkland like landscape, typified by large open spaces and patches of forest and swamp. "Our data suggest that these trees would have been abundant sooner if the herbivores hadn't been there to eat them."

While both the extinction of North America's ice age megafauna and the sweeping change to the landscape are well-documented phenomena, there was, until now, no detailed chronology of the events that remade the continent's biological communities beginning about 14.8 thousand years ago. Establishing that the disappearance of mammoths, giant beavers, ground sloths and other large animals preceded the massive change in plant communities, promises scientists critical new insight into the dynamics of extinction and its pervasive influence on a given landscape.

The new study was funded by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the UW-Madison Center for Climatic Research in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the National Science Foundation.

http://www.news.wisc.edu/17396

After mastodons and mammoths, a transformed landscape

RIGHT: Mastodons graze on black ash trees in a pleistocene swamp. A new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows that the disappearance of North America’s large herbivores not long after the retreat of the ice sheets that covered much of the continent triggered a dramatic reshaping of the landscape. Illustration: Barry Roal Carlsen

Nov. 19, 2009
by Terry Devitt

Roughly 15,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, North America's vast assemblage of large animals — including such iconic creatures as mammoths, mastodons, camels, horses, ground sloths and giant beavers — began their precipitous slide to extinction.

And when their populations crashed, emptying a land whose diversity of large animals equaled or surpassed Africa's wildlife-rich Serengeti plains then or now, an entirely novel ecosystem emerged as broadleaved trees once kept in check by huge numbers of big herbivores claimed the landscape. Soon after, the accumulation of woody debris sparked a dramatic increase in the prevalence of wildfire, another key shaper of landscapes.

This new picture of the ecological upheaval of the North American landscape just after the retreat of the ice sheets is detailed in a study published today (Nov. 19) in the journal Science. The study, led by researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, uses fossil pollen, charcoal and dung fungus spores to paint a picture of a post-ice age terrain different from anything in the world today.

The work is important because it is "the clearest evidence to date that the extinction of a broad guild of animals had effects on other parts of these ancient ecosystems," says John W. Williams, a UW-Madison professor of geography and an expert on ancient climates and ecosystems who is the study's senior author. What's more, he says, the detailing of changes on the ice age landscape following the crash of keystone animal populations can provide critical insight into the broader effects of animals disappearing from modern landscapes.

The study was led by Jacquelyn Gill, a graduate student in Williams' lab. Other co-authors are Stephen T. Jackson of the University of Wyoming, Katherine B. Lininger of UW-Madison and Guy S. Robinson of Fordham University.

The new work, says Gill, informs but does not resolve the debate over what caused the extinction of 34 genera or groups of large animals, including icons of the ice age such as elephant like mastodons and ground sloths the size of sport utility vehicles. "Our data are not consistent with a rapid, 'blitzkrieg' overkill of large animals by humans," notes Gill, nor was their decline due to a loss of habitat.

However, the work does seem to rule out a recent hypothesis that a meteor or comet impact some 12.9 thousand years ago was responsible for the extinction of ice age North America's signature large animals.

The study was conducted using lake sediment cores obtained from Appleman Lake in Indiana, as well as data obtained previously by Robinson from sites in New York. Gill, Williams and their colleagues used pollen, charcoal and the spores of a dung fungus that requires passage through a mammalian intestinal tract to complete its life cycle to reconstruct a picture of sweeping change to the ice age environment. The decline of North America's signature ice age mammals was a gradual process, the Wisconsin researchers explain, taking about 1,000 years. The decline in the huge numbers of ice age animals is preserved in the fossil record when the fungal spores disappear from the record altogether: "About 13.8 thousand years ago, the number of spores drops dramatically. They're barely in the record anymore," Gill explains.

Like detectives reconstructing a crime scene, the group's use of dung fungus spores helps establish a precise sequence of events, showing that the crash of ice age megafauna began before plant communities started to change and before fires appeared widely on the landscape.

"The data suggest that the megafaunal decline and extinction began at the Appleman Lake site sometime between 14.8 thousand and 13.7 thousand years ago and preceded major shifts in plant community composition and the frequency of fire," notes Williams.

Absent the large herbivores that kept them in check, such tree species as black ash, elm and ironwood began to colonize a landscape dominated by coniferous trees such as spruce and larch. The resulting mix of boreal and temperate trees formed a plant community unlike any observed today.

"As soon as herbivores drop off the landscape, we see different plant communities," Gill explains, noting that mastodon herds and other large animals occupied a parkland like landscape, typified by large open spaces and patches of forest and swamp. "Our data suggest that these trees would have been abundant sooner if the herbivores hadn't been there to eat them."

While both the extinction of North America's ice age megafauna and the sweeping change to the landscape are well-documented phenomena, there was, until now, no detailed chronology of the events that remade the continent's biological communities beginning about 14.8 thousand years ago. Establishing that the disappearance of mammoths, giant beavers, ground sloths and other large animals preceded the massive change in plant communities, promises scientists critical new insight into the dynamics of extinction and its pervasive influence on a given landscape.

The new study was funded by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the UW-Madison Center for Climatic Research in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the National Science Foundation.

http://www.news.wisc.edu/17396

Was there a Stone Age apocalypse or not?

19 November 2009 by Jeff Hecht

Was there a Stone Age apocalypse or not? One narrative has it that about 13,000 years ago a comet blasted North America, wiping out the continent's megafauna – as well as its early settlers.

It's a compelling story, offering a simple explanation to the mystery of why mammoths, mastodons, and Clovis humans vanished. But it's a controversial theory, and new research suggests the impact was far too small to have done any serious damage.

Doubts centre on the speed of extinctions, the fate of the Clovis culture, and the presence of supposed impact signatures. But advocates of the comet-blast theory say they will present their own new data at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in San Francisco, where they will share the stage with sceptics.

"Nothing special happened at 12,900 years ago," says John Williams of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His data, reported in Science this week, suggest that large mammals were already rare well before the purported impact.

Read full story at: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18175-was-there-a-stone-age-apocalypse-or-not.html

(Submitted by Tim Chapman)

Was there a Stone Age apocalypse or not?

19 November 2009 by Jeff Hecht

Was there a Stone Age apocalypse or not? One narrative has it that about 13,000 years ago a comet blasted North America, wiping out the continent's megafauna – as well as its early settlers.

It's a compelling story, offering a simple explanation to the mystery of why mammoths, mastodons, and Clovis humans vanished. But it's a controversial theory, and new research suggests the impact was far too small to have done any serious damage.

Doubts centre on the speed of extinctions, the fate of the Clovis culture, and the presence of supposed impact signatures. But advocates of the comet-blast theory say they will present their own new data at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in San Francisco, where they will share the stage with sceptics.

"Nothing special happened at 12,900 years ago," says John Williams of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His data, reported in Science this week, suggest that large mammals were already rare well before the purported impact.

Read full story at: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18175-was-there-a-stone-age-apocalypse-or-not.html

(Submitted by Tim Chapman)