In most cases the bones were not even fossilized but retained their original calcium phosphate and collagen matrix. As we uncovered these plant and animal remains, we realized that this site contained a singular snapshot in time of an animal community specifically adapted to cool and damp forest conditions dominated by mastodons, ground sloths, tapirs, deer, muskrats and beavers. Our most exciting osteological find was a partial skeleton of a young female mastodon lying in the bottom of the sinkhole, buried in the digesta. The recovered material includes a pair of tusks, a complete mandible with a complete set of dentition, a pair of scapulae, a humerus, a tibia, numerous vertebrae, foot bones and ribs. Unfortunately, most of the skeleton appears to have eroded away long ago, but enough was recovered to really understand the age and health status of this animal.
Paleontologists are well aware that fossil proboscideans are filled with biology .
The slow growth rates and long life spans of proboscideans allow the skeletal elements, especially the tusks, to accumulate a wealth of information about the lives of these animals and the environments they lived in. As part of a larger study of Florida mastodons and mammoths, scientists from the University of California at Santa Cruz sampled the enamel of the mastodon s molars to determine the oxygen, carbon and strontium isotope signatures. Isotopic signatures provide information about diet, migration patterns and annual temperature changes in the environments that the proboscideans occupied. The first clue about its life came when we noticed that most of the bones of this mastodon are unusually porous, and a few of the ribs have pathological growths indicating that this animal may have died from some yet unidentified disease. I looked into the life history of this mastodon by analyzing the growth rings in the tusks.