Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1931-03-15


bers of his expedition were wander
ing along the ancient and arid
shore of an inland sea.
What once had been water was now sand,
and they were hunting in this vast desert for
some traces of man or beast which had lived
in this part of the Cobb many millions Of
years ago.
The hunt for fossils is not haphazard, for
the edges of water always have been the
haunts of living things. As they walked the
men stumbled on a bone. They stopped to
dig into the sand; the pit deepened to Is
feet and then, when they were about ready
to rest and move on, the backbone Of masto-
don was turned up by a spade
They dug down IS feet and bones and
whole skeletons were disclosed in amazing
number. DR.. Andrews and his men stopped
to rest, and picture unfolded in their minds
of what had happened on this spot some
5000 600 years ago.
The desert was then green with the grass and
other foliage of a vast savanna which rolled
into forests on the uplands. In the basin was
a sheet of water as large as Lake Michigan.
Among the strange and huge creatures which
roamed these shores and plains was the shovel
tusked mastodon.
THESE prehistoric elephants were fond Of
the roots which grew in the mud and en-
joyed the succulent water plants which lowered
thickly in clumps along this shore.
The jaw, five and one-half feet long and
shaped like a scoop, was used by the monster
TO rip swath through the plants and'lift them
up to his mouth while the trunk swept them
of the shovel into the cavernous TecesSeS of
the Jaws.
The hungry mastodon, following his appetite,
vaded knee deep in the water to reach the re-
manning plants, and the soft mud gave way
under him. He lifted his feet and attempted to
swing his ponderous body on frmer ground, but
fo civ yav he
gled he sank deeper and deeper into the muck.
The water reached his mouth, then his eyes,
and he drowned. But the plants that stood over
the bog tempted one mammoth after another,
and down they went one upon the other When
the pit was opened by the Andrews expedition
the skeletons of these terrifying monsters were
found piled like so many jackstraws in the
same spot where their hunger had lured them
to death so long ago.
short distance farther along the old shore
line another pit was found but here the
skeletons were those of young and infant
mastodons who had been caught in similar
trap and were lost before the mother mastodon
had heard their call and run with her trunk
to pull the venturesome youngsters out.
That the maternal instinct of the mastodon
must have saved many from the treacherous
waters of the bog was indicated to DR.. Andrews
by the fact that they found mother mastodons
skeleton nearby; she was one who had ventured
too far and failed to make the way back her.
self. Nesting in her skeleton were the frail
bones Of an unborn mastodon.
There were literally hundreds of these
shovel-tusked mastodons," said DIR. Andrews,
who had just returned from Mongolia with the
fifth museum expedition hunting for traces of
early man and animals. THE trap had sucked
in the animals year after year, and they sank
down directly on top of each other. AS a result
we were able to bring back a complete age
series of these remarkable animals. The Is
specimens range from that of the unborn
mastodon up to the fossils Of full-grown bulls.
The collection is almost as compete If We
able to go out and gather in a herd of
them alive"
TTNIIE other discoveries of the expedition, which
consisted OF complex scientific details, in