The Pleistocene of North America: and its vertebrated animals from the states east of the Mississippi River and from the Canadian provinces east of longitude 95°Hay, Oliver Perry
Science
The Pleistocene of North America: and its vertebrated animals from the states east of the Mississippi River and from the Canadian provinces east of longitude 95°
Hay, Oliver Perry
Paleontology -- North America; Paleontology -- Pleistocene; Vertebrates, Fossil
Under this number may be recorded the discovery of mastodon teeth in a
well sunk at Mount Washington, about 8 miles east of the central part of
Cincinnati (Fuller and Clapp, Water-Supply Paper 259, 1912, p. 27). The
teeth were found in coarse gravel, which lies only 15 feet from the
surface, and is overlain by old till and loess. The indications are that
the age of the mastodon is early Pleistocene.
IN AREA OF WISCONSIN DRIFT.
4. _Amanda, Butler County._—In the collection of the Philadelphia
Academy of Sciences the writer has seen 2 teeth of a mastodon, probably
of the same individual, which are labeled as having been found on Dick’s
Creek, Butler County. This creek is in Lemon Township, and flowing
westward, empties into the Miami near Amanda. The teeth are credited to
W. S. Vaux. No details regarding the circumstances of discovery are
recorded. The locality is south of the Germantown moraine.
5. _Germantown, Montgomery County._—In 1875 (Cin. Quart. Jour. Sci.,
vol. II, p. 154), Mr. J. H. Klippart reported that some years before
that time an account had been published in the Dayton Journal of the
finding of teeth, tusks, and some other parts of the skeleton of a
mastodon near Germantown. It is not known whether any competent person
identified these remains, nor what has become of them.
In 1870 (Amer. Jour. Sci., ser. 2, vol. L, pp. 54–57), Edward Orton
described a geological section which was exposed along Twin Creek, a
mile east of Germantown. Here were found precipitous walls of clay and
gravel from 50 to 100 feet in thickness and extending 0.25 mile in each
direction from a point. Beneath this was a bed of peat along 40 rods of
the east bank of the creek, varying from 12 to 20 feet in thickness. In
the peat-bed were found mosses, grasses, sedges, and wood and berries of
red cedar. Orton reported that in 1870 there were taken from this bed
two mastodon tusks each 8 feet in length; also a tooth which afterwards
was shown to belong to _Castoroides_. Whether or not these tusks were
those mentioned by Klippart is uncertain.
This section is discussed by Leverett (Monogr. U. S. Geol. Surv., XLI,
p. 363, plate XIV) and by G. F. Wright (“Ice age in North America,” 5th
ed., p. 592, fig. 151). The latter regards the peat-bed as having come
into existence during a temporary recession of the Wisconsin ice and as
having been covered up during another advance of it. Leverett thinks
that there is good reason to believe that the peat-bed indicates a
considerable interval of deglaciation, but that it remains to be
determined whether this preceded the formation of the early Wisconsin
moraine or succeeded it. Considering the great thickness of the
overlying Wisconsin drift and the almost certainty that Illinoian drift
underlies the Wisconsin, it seems probable that this peat-bed belongs to
an interglacial deposit, probably the Sangamon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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