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
_Feet._ _Inches._
Filled-in materials 4 0
Clay and peat, mixed 1 0
Peat 1 3
Peat and clay, mixed 1 0
Peat, clay, and shells 1 0
Clear blue clay with the elephant bones at the
bottom 4 6
Gravel and cobblestones undetermined.
As indicated in Turner’s sketch, the surface of the gravel and stones
sloped downward toward the north.
It will be seen that the bones were buried about 9 or 10 feet below the
natural surface of the ground. The head of the elephant was directed
toward the east, the hinder end toward the west. The parts found were
within a distance of 10 feet from east to west. Later the excavations on
each side of the sewer were extended eastward, as shown on the plan, in
an effort to find the skull, but without success, and iron rods 10 feet
long, in two sections, were driven their full length horizontally
everywhere around the excavation in the hope of recovering the skull.
For some time after the finding of these bones the theory prevailed that
they had belonged to an elephant of one of the circuses which had made
use of the ground near there. The fact that the lower jaw was found, but
not the upper jaw and the brain-case, and only a part of the vertebræ
and a part of the foot-bones, is sufficient to dispose of this theory.
Also, some of the bones lack the epiphyses. Besides this, the elephant
was neither the African nor the Asiatic species. It is evident that the
animal after dying had lain on the surface for some time, so that the
bones were somewhat scattered, perhaps by wolves or waves, and some were
injured by exposure to the weather.
The following is a list of the bones found: Lower jaw, 5 cervicals, 9
presacrals, 31 ribs, both scapulæ, both humeri, both ulnæ, both radii, 9
wristbones, 14 metacarpals and phalanges, 1 femur and a fragment of the
other, 2 tibiæ, 2 fibulæ, 17 metatarsals and phalanges.
It is evident that this elephant lived and died after the Lake Michigan
ice-lobe had withdrawn from that vicinity. It may, however, not have
been long after that withdrawal; for it is probable that the muddy
waters from the foot of that glacial lobe furnished the blue clay which
enveloped the bones. Later peat and muck and mixtures of these with clay
accumulated over the blue clay. The place is within the area of what
Alden has mapped as ground moraine of Lake Michigan glacier. The
occurrence of peat and shells seems to show that there was a pond in
which the elephant had been buried and afterwards covered with clay and
peat.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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