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
10. _Cannonsburg, Kent County._—In the Kent Scientific Museum at Grand
Rapids is a lower left last molar, labeled as having been found at
Cannonsburg, by Henry Detmer. The exact locality of the place where the
tooth was found is unknown to the writer. The tooth is only slightly
worn and is of a white color. Cannonsburg is on a great expansion of
what Leverett and Taylor call the Charlotte morainic system, a system
produced by the Saginaw lobe of the Wisconsin glacier. Being one of the
more distant moraines of the Saginaw lobe, it was one of the earliest to
be freed from ice and to offer itself to animal occupancy; but it may
not have been invaded by mastodons until the glacial wall had moved much
farther away.
11. _Moorland, Muskegon County._—In the Kent Scientific Museum at Grand
Rapids, Michigan, is a mounted mastodon, the bones of which, except the
limbs, belong to a specimen found about 1905 in a swamp north of
Moorland. The exact locality, as given by Mr. C. L. McKay, the finder,
is the northwest quarter of the northeast quarter, section 16, township
10 north, range 14 west. The skull and the tusks are in good condition.
Beneath the skeleton was found the skull which was made the type of
_Boötherium sargenti_ Gidley.
The Moorland swamp forms part of a great plain about 25 miles wide lying
between the “Lake border morainic system” (Leverett and Taylor, p. 222)
and the present eastern shore of Lake Michigan. This plain appears to
have been occupied by either ice or the waters of old glacial lakes
until well near the close of the Wisconsin stage. The animal must have
been one of the latest of his tribe to inhabit the State of Michigan. It
may have lived long after the time of the musk-ox on whose skull the
mastodon’s pelvis was lying.
12. _Williams Township, Bay County._—In the annual reports of the
Geological Survey of Michigan (1901, p. 253; 1905, p. 354), the
discovery of the skeleton of a mastodon in Bay County was announced. It
had been found in a depression called a pot-hole. The locality more
accurately given is in the southwest corner of section 3, township 14
north, range 3 east. There was a fragment of a tusk 8.75 feet long and
but little curved, a femur and its socket 9.5 inches across, one
vertebra, and one tooth. These were found 3 or 4 feet from the surface.
The remains were sent to Ypsilanti. An examination of Leverett and
Taylor’s plate XVII (Monograph LIII) indicates that the mastodon could
not probably have lived there until after the time of Lake Warren. At
that time the ice-sheet occupied most of Lake Huron and a part of
Saginaw Bay, but the climate of that region was probably, for a long
time after the passing of Lake Warren, too raw and cold to please the
mastodon, so that it was long afterward that this individual left his
skeleton in the boggy hole.
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