Every bone in this mastodon skeleton is real. Discovered in 1845, it was the first entire American mastodon skeleton found in the United States, and is still one of the most complete such skeletons known. It was uncovered by a crew digging for peat fuel less than 100 miles from New York City, in a bog near the town of Newburgh, in Orange County, New York. When found, the mastodon was still in the position in which it had died some 11 thousand years ago, standing upright, with its legs thrust forward and its head tilted upward, apparently gasping for air.
This specimen is named for John Warren, a professor of anatomy at
Harvard University who bought the remains, wrote about them, and displayed
them in a small museum in Boston. The Warren Mastodon was acquired by
the American Museum of Natural History in 1925. Mastodons, like living
elephants, are proboscideans. Yet unlike elephants today, mastodons
ranged widely over the northern continents. Other proboscidean skeletons
unearthed in North America are displayed in the Museum near the Warren
Mastodon. One of them, Gomphotherium, a distant relative of the mastodon,
lived 10 million years ago and was discovered in South Dakota. Another
is the skeleton of a mammoth that died approximately 20 thousand years
ago, and was collected in Indiana. (Mammoths
were the giants among proboscideans, and are more closely related to
living elephants than is the mastodon.)
The discovery of the mastodon skeleton, and Warren's serious treatment of it, mark the beginning of vertebrate paleontology in this country.
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