June 1, 2025 — For a couple in Orange County, a trip to the back reaches of their property in October 2024 turned into a significant paleontological and archaeological find that brought PEF members from the New York State Museum (NYSM) into their backyard.
“They literally stumbled on these mastodon teeth that came loose,” said PEF member and Curator of Archaeology Jon Lothrop, who has been with the NYSM for 17 years. Excavation revealed more just below the surface. “The cusps on the molars, still embedded in the jaw, were sticking out from the grass.”
Lothrop said this is a rare occurrence, even though Orange County is an epicenter for mastodon fossils in New York state.
“Typically, they’re found below six to eight feet of peat,” he said. “The mastodon either died or fell into proglacial lake basins during the Ice Age and their bones ended up in the bottom of the lakebed. It was really unusual to see these near the surface.”
Lothrop explained that this basin was a small one, which is why former PEF member Robert Feranec, now the Director of Research and Collections and Curator of Pleistocene Vertebrate Paleontology, believes these fossils are so close to the surface.
Excavating is a delicate process – and some of the tools used can be unexpected. In her personal tool kit, PEF member Alexandra DeCarlo, an anthropology research and collections technician, has a spoon among her trowels, brushes, and bamboo knife.
Museum scientists carefully removed the jaw from the site in October 2024. Because bits of fossil fall off from frost and thaw and the activities of excavation, making sure to get all the pieces requires removing soil surrounding the bones. With this find, the left and right sides of the jaw were no longer connected after 13,000 years in the ground, so they were removed and transported separately.
“When we started excavating the left side, we found different bones that are not part of the jaw,” said Kristin O’Connell-Houston, a research and collections technician for historical archaeology. “The importance of that, the presence of another part of the mastodon skeleton, tells you that it’s not just the jaw that’s there, there are other parts – and perhaps the rest of the skeleton is nearby.”
For the trip to the museum, the bone and surrounding soil is wrapped in a common household item for transport: aluminum foil.
“The tinfoil, I know ,everyone giggles,” O’Connell-Houston said. “But it’s very inert and it’s been used forever. It has a great shelf life, and it really molds to the animal bone.”
To trap moisture during transport, the tinfoil-encased bone is further wrapped in poly sheet plastic and firmly secured in plastic bins.
The bones are heavy, just the left side of the jaw and the soil samples weighed more than 30 pounds.
Back at the lab
While some of the fossil remains in the foil and poly sheet plastic, other parts are scattered across the lab table on paper towels, with hand-written notes on each.
Nearby is a chin specimen from the museum’s Pleistocene Vertebrate Paleontology collection that O’Connell-Houston is using as a reference as she painstakingly pieces together the tiny bits of bone, like a 13,000-year-old jigsaw puzzle.
“We had to let this dry very slowly because if it dries too fast, the bone is subject to dramatic changes,” said O’Connell-Houston. “You want to make sure it’s dried so we don’t lose anything or get any more cracks.
“I’m working on the chin and the beginning of the premolar,” she said. “You can’t just remove the soil, with the clay content, it’s clinging to the bones.”
Unable to just pick at it with tools, O’Connell-Houston uses a wash bottle with deionized water to rewet the soil, not the bone, and waits for the soil to loosen a bit.
“You can see our notes for every single fragment,” she said. “We were really happy to find that the bone was more stable than we thought.”
Reconstructing the mastodon mandible has been a slow and methodical process. Conservation treatment of the specimen involves adhesives that do not add moisture, are reversible, and have long term stability. Every time a new piece of the puzzle is revealed and subsequently solved; it’s an exciting day in the lab.
Significance of research
“Some of the big questions that Ice Age paleontologists try to answer include what happened with animals that went extinct near the end of or after the Ice Age,” Lothrop said. “We have a sense of what the environment was like from paleo-environmental specialists, and paleobotanists who excavate cores from lakes and radiocarbon date them and take pollen counts from different species.
“So, we know that at the time the mastodon died, that part of New York was a spruce forest and that’s what they liked to browse on,” he said. “This find provides a new opportunity to understand how and when these animals adapted to Ice Age environments.”
There is some ongoing debate on why mastodons became extinct in New York between 12,500 and 12,000 years ago, which was well before the end of the Ice Age (11,600 years ago), Lothrop said.
There is a possible alternative explanation to climate change.
“What we know now is that early indigenous people migrated into Ice Age New York roughly 12,800 years ago,” Lothrop said. “So, they overlapped for several centuries with the mastodon. Surely, they knew mastodon were out there. Did they hunt them, did they help drive them to extinction in New York? When you find a new mastodon specimen, it’s a new opportunity to study these questions.
“From a scientific standpoint, it’s an opportunity to reconstruct the natural history of New York by investigating another now extinct animal species using current techniques that they may not have had 50 years ago,” Lothrop said.
Future excavation at the site may reveal artifacts that could paint a picture of this mastodon’s final days. Faculty and students from SUNY Orange will return to the site this summer for a field school and perhaps unearth new details.
“As yet, there is no archaeological evidence that early Native Americans hunted mastodons in Ice Age New York,” Lothrop said. “However, if more excavations at this site uncover stone tools with the fossil remains, it would suggest this mastodon met its demise because of hunting versus other causes.”
The people behind the research
Finding your way into the field can be a lifelong passion or it can be a chance college course.
“I’ve had a long-standing fascination with understanding unwritten human past through archaeology,” Lothrop said, while DeCarlo took a college class and knew it was what she wanted to pursue as a career.
“After I graduated, I started volunteering here,” DeCarlo said. “I fell in love with it and the collections, and I knew that’s what I wanted to do.”
O’Connell-Houston was interested in human/environmental interactions, as well as chemical interactions between artifacts and their buried environments.
“I love working in the lab,” she said. “I love that every day is different and presents a challenge to preserve material for future research.”
O’Connell-Houston said some projects take days – others, years. With this project, her focus is on removing dried and hardened soil from bone fragments.
“It takes a lot of patience and attention to detail,” she said.
For aspiring paleontologists and archeologists, the museum can be a great resource for volunteer and internship opportunities.
“Our interns and volunteers range from school age to undergrad to graduate to retired,” O’Connell-Houston said. “We want the public to know there is so much opportunity here. You just have to ask and reach out.”
She shared some of her fondest memories over the years.
“Definitely in my early years, was the field work,” she said. “The poison ivy, not so much, but everything else. There’s so much more to learn. I’m looking at things that were excavated 50 years ago, and some questions are still not answered.”
*Editor’s note: While this mastodon is not yet on display, you can still visit the Cohoes Mastodon exhibit at the New York State Museum to get an up-close look at one. For those interested in volunteer or internship opportunities at the NYSM, click here.
