New York Man Digs Up Mastodon Fossil in His Backyard

Some people want hippopotamuses for Christmas—but a man in Scotchtown, New York, got a mastodon.

The man, who does not want to be identified, found a fossilized mastodon jaw, complete with the extinct giant’s distinctive teeth, in his backyard earlier this year. Scotchtown is about 70 miles (112 kilometers) northwest of New York City, and the jaw is the first found in the state in over a decade.

A Dutch farmer unearthed the first mastodon found in North America in Claverack, New York, in 1705. Roughly 150 fossils of extinct elephant relatives have been found across the state—about one-third of them in Orange County—and according to Untapped New York, over a dozen mastodon fossils have been found in New York City alone. Suffice to say, southern New York was mastodon central back in the day.

Mastodons are not to be confused with mammoths, though both roamed Earth through the Pleistocene and some of the Holocene. But there are some differences; mastodon heads were flatter and their tusks were less curvy. But the most obvious difference is in the teeth: Mastodon teeth have conical points—fittingly, the name “mastodon” literally means “breast tooth.”

According to Robert Feranec, the New York State Museum’s director of research and collections and curator of Ice Age mammals, the man found the mastodon while gardening and originally mistook the teeth for baseballs.

The mastodon teeth. Photo: New York State Museum

“When I found the teeth and examined them in my hands, I knew they were something special and decided to call in the experts,” the homeowner said in a museum release. “I’m thrilled that our property has yielded such an important find for the scientific community.”

Subsequent excavation by museum staff and the State University of New York, Orange County, yielded a piece of a toe bone, a rib fragment, and the entire jaw of an adult mastodon.

“While the jaw is the star of the show, the additional toe and rib fragments offer valuable context and the potential for additional research,” said Cory Harris, an anthropologist at SUNY Orange, in the same release. “We are also hoping to further explore the immediate area to see if there are any additional bones that were preserved.”

In recent years, advances in ancient DNA research have helped scientists better understand the life and times of North American mastodons. In 2022, a team of researchers managed to unpack most of the life history of the Buesching mastodon—affectionally called Fred—from his 13,000-year-old tusk.

The researchers plan to carbon date the mastodon jaw to determine its precise age, but also its diet and the kind of habitat it lived in—just as the aforementioned team did with Fred. According to the museum, the fossil will be put on display sometime in 2025.

North America’s proboscideans went extinct by about 10,500 years ago, but their remains continue to reveal how the ancient beasts existed in life.