The Wichita daily eagle., 1891-09-05
BONES OF .MASTOD0NS,
Why COMPLETE SKELETONS ARE
RARELY FOUND NOWADAYS.

Carried Away by Smaller Creatures and
Then the Bones Generally Deoompose
| Evidence That Men Saw Them.
A reporter has had an interesting tall
with Professor Ward on the subject oi
the mastodon remains discovered at Oak
field. "a man came to rue yesterday, >
said he, land showed me rib which he
said he had dug up. 1t was certainly 6
mastodon rib. He said he was going to
dig for the rest of it, but doubt if he
| finds very much more. You can easily
see how this might be. Suppose an or
gets stuck in the mud and dies, wolves
tear the flesh and gnaw the bones; per-
haps skunk viii carry some of the
smaller ones into his hole. Bones de-
compose. If there is food they become
scattered.
$50, you see, before time has dug a
grave in which the remains of our i'm
aginary on may rest undisturbed for
ages, chance has scattered them far and
wide. So it is with the fossil remains
of the mastodon and mammoth, and the
man who finds one bone Of the animal
and digs for the rest is very apt to be
disappointed. There is hardly county
in the United States west of New Eng
land where remains of mastodons have
not been found at one time or another.
The country was full of them. l believe
that a mastodon tooth was found in this
city some twenty years ago, and several
bones were found near the Brighton
lock The mammoth bore about the
same relation to the mastodon that the
Indian elephant does to the African.
''Mastodons were more numerous in
this country and mammoths in Europe
and Asia.
THE STUDY OF BONES.
81 have here" continued Professor
Ward, "the skull and upper jaw of a
baby mastodon which, as you see, is
very perfect. The teeth are milk teeth,
and you can see one of the second teeth
imbedded in the upper jaw. The teeth
formed at the rear and were pushed for
ward. say a baby mastodon, and SO it
was; but it was as large as the largest
OK to be seen at a county fair. Under
the upper layer of skull you see this sort
of honeycomb Of bone. You know
enough of anatomy to remember that
the human skull lis composed of an
upper and under layer of hard bone,
with softer bone between. The human
head does not require to be large to be
in proportion to the body, and a caput
just large enough to hold the brain is all
that is required.
"An elephant, mastodon or mammoth
does not require large brain, but they
all need a massive head. Here you have
the upper and under layer, as in the
human skull, but the porous bone be-
tween is magnifed enormously. 1t is
nearly foot in thickness in some of the
larger specimens. remember when |
was on the coast of Africa seeing what l
supposed to be an enormous hornets
nest. The natives told me it was the
head Of an elephant which they had
killed three or four years previous. The
upper layer Of the skull had been shelled
off, leaving the middle honeycomb of
bone exposed to view. It was some time
before l could bring myself to believe
that it was really an elephants skull"
Professor Ward showed his visitor his
collection of mammoth and mastodon
bones. He has nearly enough of different
sizes to reconstruct an entire animal,
but, of course, the variation in size
would prevent this. 1t is much more
in the results obtained to
take these specimens for models and re-
construct a skeleton from wood. 81 sup
pose, " said the reporter, after prolonged
of these curiosities, II sup
pose that human eyes never saw these
animals that roamed over the
country in such vast numbers SO long