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
WITHIN AREA COVERED BY ILLINOIAN DRIFT.
3. _Beaucoup, Washington County._—In 1857, the geologist J. W. Foster
reported (Proc. Amer. Assoc. Adv. Science, vol. X, Nat. Hist., p. 163)
that remains of a mastodon had been discovered by workmen in making an
excavation along the Illinois Central Railroad, near the town of
Beaucoup. The bones were at a depth of 18 feet in the prairie drift,
below the yellow clay and in the older or reddish clay. No details were
given as to what bones were found or what was done with them.
Most of this county is covered by Illinoian drift. Leverett (Monogr. U.
S. Geol. Surv., XXXVIII, p. 770) states that on the higher lands this
has a depth of from 10 to 20 feet. One might suppose that at a depth of
18 feet some pre-Illinoian interglacial deposit had been encountered. It
is not at all probable that the bones of the mastodon were inclosed in
the drift itself.
4. _East St. Louis, St. Clair County._—Dr. F. V. Hayden (Proc. Acad.
Nat. Sci. Phila., 1866, p. 316) announced the finding of a tooth of a
mastodon in the bluffs opposite St. Louis. This was probably in St.
Clair County.
In the American Museum of Natural History, New York, is a lower right
last molar of a mastodon, labeled as having been found in St. Clair
County, but there is no other information.
In the collection of the St. Louis Academy of Science there are two
teeth of a mastodon, right and left last upper molars, which had been
brought in by a boy and presented to the Academy. He said that they had
been found in East St. Louis and had been in the possession of the
family for some time. The length of the left molar is 175 mm., the width
102 mm. While the valley of the Mississippi River is here filled by
deposits laid down during the Wisconsin stage (Leverett, op cit., plate
VI) and by later-formed alluvium, Illinoian drift enters into the
bluffs, and perhaps pre-Illinoian interglacial soils. It is, therefore,
of interest that there should be an exact record made of the place of
discovery of every bone and tooth found, the character of the deposit,
and the depth of burial. In all the cases here recorded no such records
have been kept.
5. _Alton, Madison County._—In 1866 (Geol. Surv. Illinois, vol. I, p.
315; 1871, Amer. Naturalist, vol. V, p. 607), A. H. Worthen reported
that a part of a jawbone of a mastodon, with two teeth in it, had been
found in the lower part of the loess, 30 feet below the surface, at some
point just above Alton. The jaw was separated from the limestone by 2 or
3 feet of local drift. The bone was of a chalky whiteness and in a fine
state of preservation. Worthen wrote that the loess on the bluffs in
this region is from 40 to 80 feet in thickness, but appears in places to
have been removed by erosion, so that it comes down to the rock.
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