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
35. _Pony Hollow, Tompkins County._—In 1915 (Science, vol. XLI, pp.
98–99), Pearl Sheldon, of the Department of Geology in Cornell
University, reported that a tusk, probably of a mastodon, had been found
at Pony Hollow, 12 miles southwest of Ithaca, on the farm of Bert Drake.
This place, as shown on the Ithaca Quadrangle topographical sheet, is in
the southwest corner of the county. As the writer is informed by Miss
Sheldon, it is on Cantor Creek, near its junction with West Branch. The
tusk was met with in a gravel-pit at a depth of 24 feet. The radius of
curvature was between 2 and 3 feet, the circumference from 10 to 13
inches. It may have been the tusk of an elephant. The pit was in the
base of an extensive terrace which follows the valley-wall high above
the outwash gravel-plain occupying the floor of the valley. The reporter
thought that the terrace was not later in origin than the end of the ice
occupation of the valley, and might be earlier.
Miss Sheldon informed the writer that the terrace which contained the
mastodon tusk is too high in the valley to have been formed by water
backed up against the retreating ice-front. Furthermore, the locality is
south of the divide. It was suggested that during the retreat of the ice
the southward-flowing water in the Pony Hollow basin was backed up
somewhat by the ice in the Seneca basin. At any rate, the terrace and
the mastodon contained in it belong to the latter part of the Wisconsin
ice stage.
36. _Elmira, Chemung County._—Dr. John M. Clarke (60th Ann. Rep. New
York State Mus., p. 59) referred to reports of the eighteenth century to
the effect that tusks of proboscideans had been found in Chemung River,
one of them just below Elmira. It is very probable that some or all of
these had belonged to the mastodon.
Apparently all that can be said about the geological age of these
proboscideans is that they lived during or after the last half of the
Wisconsin drift stage.
37. _Lodi, Seneca County._—In the American Museum of Natural History,
New York, there are second and third upper mastodon molars, recorded as
having been found at Lodi. The town is on the eastern shore of Seneca
Lake. This animal belonged to the last half of the Wisconsin stage, or
to a later one. Possibly it was living there at the early period when
the impounded waters of the Finger Lake region were discharging through
Susquehanna River.
38. _Macedon, Wayne County._—Dr. J. M. Clarke, in 1903 (Bull. 69, N. Y.
State Mus., p. 930) reported for Professor H. L. Fairchild, that there
are in the University of Rochester a few mastodon teeth from this place.
There is no information on record about the geology of the place where
they were found. The animal belonged to a relatively late stage of the
Pleistocene and may have lived close to the beginning of the Recent. The
glacier had withdrawn near to or within the basin of Lake Ontario.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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