“Unearthed from the Past: Iowa Teen’s Incredible Discovery of a 34,000-Year-Old Mastodon Jaw on a Friend’s Farm”
Wikimedia CommonsA mastodon skeleton on display at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Until about ten thousands years ago, mastodons roamed North America.
Iowa’s landscape used to be a paradise for myriad giant prehistoric animals — among them giant beavers, short-faced bears, giant ground sloths, camels, horses, and bison.
As such, the university’s Paleontology Repository is home to an impressive collection of fossils, including many well-preserved teeth specimens. Twelve years ago, the Iowa Geological Survey (IGS), found the remains of 6-foot-long sea scorpion — which turned out to be a new species. The scorpion was found in a crater created by a meteorite 475 million years ago.
“I think people are finding stuff all the time,” Adrain said. “Maybe they are out canoeing or fishing on a bank. Farmers, in particular, on the land can spot things pretty easily.” She added that these type of remains are quite common, especially along the Iowan waterways. She hopes that someone will be able to donate some saber-tooth cat fossils someday.
Because findings have been fairly frequent, one might say that the collection at the repository has been a community effort. The institute receives many donations of bones found by unsuspecting Iowans, researchers, and even young high school students. In the early 2000s, the center received a particularly large donation: a prehistoric fossil that weighs 10 tons.
There are more than a million specimens housed at the repository. So far, about 148,000 of them have been catalogued with help from local high school and college students.
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