Mastodons’ last dinner offers insight to scientists

DDale Gnidovec

uring two bitterly cold December days in 1989, the bones of an almost fully grown male mastodon were excavated in central Ohio. Discovered beneath about 8 feet of ancient lake sediment while digging a pond on the Burning Tree golf course in Heath, just south of Newark, it became known as the Burning Tree Mastodon.

Mastodons were related to elephants, but they were relics of a much more ancient branch of the family tree, essentially living fossils. They became extinct between 12,790 and 12,520 years ago, at the end of the ice age.

The Burning Tree Mastodon had been killed, or at least butchered, by people. Some of its bones had cut marks from stone tools, and the bones were arranged in three separate piles, each one probably representing a store of meat to feed a human family during the coming winter. Although no stone tools were found at the site, the carcass was likely butchered some distance away and the pieces dragged to the pond for storage where the cold water would act like a refrigerator.

Among the bones was a coherent cylindrical reddish-brown mass of plant material 23 inches long and about 4-½ inches in diameter with a pungent odor — contents of the mastodon’s small intestine and remains of its last meal.

Some recent research by an international team of scientists from Norway, the Netherlands and the United States analyzed that mass (along with one from the large intestine of the Heisler Mastodon from Michigan, which also was butchered by humans) to determine what the mastodons were eating.

The lake sediment that the Burning Tree Mastodon was encased in contained a lot of pollen from spruce and pine trees, along with abundant seeds of aquatic plants.

In contrast to the enclosing sediment, the intestinal contents contained mainly grassy material, mosses and non-coniferous twigs, with much less aquatic vegetation. The leaves and twigs were mainly from birch, pine and willow trees, along with sedge and fen-herb seeds.

Though we now have a better idea of what mastodons (at least these two) were eating, the research produced a small mystery.

The tusks of mastodons have yearly growth rings, sort of like those in trees. Previous analysis of the tusks of both the Burning Tree and Heisler mastodon showed the animals died in the autumn, but the authors of this new study suggested the plants in their guts indicate their deaths took place in early summer or even late spring.

You can see a number of mastodon skeletons on display in Ohio museums, but the Burning Tree is not one of them. It is on exhibit at a museum in Japan.

Dale Gnidovec is curator of the Orton Geological Museum at Ohio State University. gnidovec.1@osu.edu