A Homeowner Found Huge, Fossil Teeth While Mowing the Lawn. Then, Excavations Revealed a Complete Mastodon Jaw

While mowing the lawn back in September, a homeowner in Orange County, New York, spotted strange objects poking through the plants. At first, the resident thought they were baseballs. But after picking them up, it became clear they were something much rarer: giant fossil teeth.

The homeowner—who, according to the Associated Press, wishes to remain anonymous—alerted the appropriate experts, leading researchers from the state museum and SUNY Orange to descend upon the backyard and begin an excavation. As they unearthed the remains, they revealed a complete mastodon jaw.

The prehistoric finding, which is the first of its kind uncovered in New York in more than 11 years, was announced in a New York State Educational Department statement on Tuesday.

Mastodons were large, tusked, elephant-like mammals distantly related to woolly mammoths and modern elephants. Slightly smaller than mammoths, they existed around the world from the early Miocene (2.6 million to 23 million years ago) through the Pleistocene (11,700 to 2.6 million years ago). In North America, however, the enormous mammals likely survived even longer, meaning their presence likely overlapped with the arrival of humans on the continent. Like mammoths, mastodons disappeared toward the end of the last ice age, when a series of factors, including climate change and human hunting, drove many large animals to extinction, as Jess Thomson reports for Newsweek.

“This discovery is a testament to the rich paleontological history of New York and the ongoing efforts to understand its past,” Robert Feranec, the New York State Museum’s director of research and collections, says in the statement. “This mastodon jaw provides a unique opportunity to study the ecology of this magnificent species, which will enhance our understanding of the Ice Age ecosystems from this region.”

“Fossils are resources that provide remarkable snapshots of the past, allowing us to not only reconstruct ancient ecosystems but also provide us with better context and understanding of the current world around us,” he adds.

In addition to the well-preserved jaw, the researchers also uncovered a part of a rib and toe bone. They plan on further analyzing the jaw and bone fragments, including through carbon dating, to better understand the animal’s age, diet and prehistoric habitat, according to the statement. For now, the researchers have identified the remains as belonging to an adult mastodon.

The magnitude of the find surprised even the museum experts. “Initially I just thought we would kind of poke around and grab the other tooth and pull it out of the ground, and that would be it,” Feranec says to ABC’s Eyewitness News. “But as we poked around that other tooth, it wasn’t moving, and we kind of poked around a little more and realized that it was stuck in something.”

“I’m thrilled that our property has yielded such an important find for the scientific community,” the homeowner says in the statement.

Orange County is well-known for its mastodon fossils—in fact, about a third of the 150 mastodon fossils unearthed in New York state were discovered in Orange County.

This might be due to the fact that retreating Ice Age glaciers left behind a “kind of Ice Age lake” with biologically rich land that attracted animals to the region, Cory Harris, chair of SUNY Orange’s behavioral sciences department, tells the Times Union’s Lana Bellamy and Phillip Pantuso. He adds that modern human activities in the area, like land development, also increase the chance of finding fossils. 

However, even though “Orange County has a lot of mastodons relative to the rest of the state and, really, the rest of the country,” as Harris tells ABC, “that still doesn’t mean you find it every day.”

The recent mastodon discovery will be included in public programming next year, according to the statement, and the researchers hope to continue exploring the area around the fateful Orange County backyard for future excavations.

Margherita Bassi | READ MORE

Margherita Bassi is a freelance journalist and trilingual storyteller. Her work has appeared in publications including BBC Travel, Discover magazine, Live Science, Atlas Obscura and Hidden Compass.