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
4. _Bellevue, Eaton County._—The writer has learned from Mr. N. A. Wood,
of the University of Michigan, that mastodon remains had been described
from near Bellevue by Mr. E. A. Foote, in the third volume of the Report
of the Pioneer Society of Michigan, on pages 402–403. The animal was
found on the farm of Mr. Charles Cummings. It was a large one, the femur
having a length of 3 feet 10 inches and one tusk was over 12 feet in
length. Four teeth belonged to the upper jaw. The remains must have been
found before 1879.
Bellevue is situated on the Kalamazoo River, which here traverses the
Kalamazoo moraine. As in other cases in the central regions of the
State, mastodons may have lived at a rather early stage after the
Wisconsin ice began to withdraw; but they may have kept farther from the
glacial front.
5. _Olivet, Eaton County._—Dr. A. C. Lane (Ann. Rept. Board of Geol.
Surv. Michigan for 1901, p. 253) reported the finding of mastodon bones
near Olivet. A letter from Professor Samuel Rittenhouse, of Olivet
College, gives the information that many of the bones of the skeleton
had been secured. These were exhumed from a marsh on the northwest
quarter of section 11, township 1 north, range 5 west. Following
Leverett and Taylor’s map, the locality seems to be on an esker through
which flows Battle Creek. The country in this region is covered by the
Kalamazoo morainic system of the Saginaw lobe. The mastodon must have
been buried after the ice receded from that moraine.
6. _Stanton, Montcalm County._—Mr. N. A. Wood, preparator in the
University of Michigan, informed the writer that Mr. L. C. Hodges, of
Stanton, in 1911 found some mastodon teeth. Nothing more is known about
these remains. Stanton is situated between the West Branch morainic
system and the Charlotte system.
7. _Buchanan, Berrien County._—Mr. William Hillis Smith, of Niles,
Michigan, informed the writer that many remains of mastodons were found
in a large ditch made to drain the Bakerstown marsh. This ditch began
south and west of Buchanan and emptied into Lake Michigan. It was 16
feet wide and 8 to 10 feet deep. In the course of the work bones and
teeth were frequently thrown out by the steam shovel, especially bones
of mastodons. One skull was badly crushed, but was repaired by Mr. E. H.
Crane, of Kalamazoo, and sold to the Ward Establishment, of Rochester,
New York. Exact statements as to localities are wanting, but the ditch
was evidently located on and within the Valparaiso moraine. It is this
moraine which runs around the southern end of Lake Michigan and
separates the St. Lawrence drainage from that of the Mississippi; east
of the lake it extends far north into Michigan. Naturally, this moraine
was formed before the withdrawal of the Lake Michigan lobe of the
Wisconsin glacier into that lake, and the mastodons might have lived,
died, and been buried there at any time after the exposure of the
moraine and the development of climatal conditions that permitted their
existence.
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