Mastodon fossil find in Colorado a jaw-dropper
Jake Carstensen, left, and Tyler Kellett watch Logan Ivy, Earth Science Collection manager at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, inspect a mastodon mandible Friday that the teens found in June while playing along a stream in Ken-Caryl Ranch.
The discovery of a mastodon mandible, left, by two teenage boys could mean the ice age mammal's skeleton is buried nearby, but excavating it would be expensive.
By Douglas J. Brown | The Denver Post
PUBLISHED: October 3, 2009 at 1:52 p.m. | UPDATED: May 6, 2016 at 7:39 p.m.
The mastodon spent its days lumbering along the Front Range, chewing leaves. One day it died. During the course of thousands of years, sediment buried the beast.
Fast-forward to this summer, when along came Tyler Kellett and Jake Carstensen, 13-year-old best friends. As they played in their favorite stream behind Ken-Caryl Ranch's community pool, Jake picked up what he first thought was a rock.
It wasn't.
The hard nugget in his hand was a mandible — a jaw — from an American mastodon that died between 50,000 and 150,000 years ago. The boys' find led to the discovery of a 5-foot tusk too, making it the most significant mastodon fossil ever unearthed in Colorado, and the first in 85 years.
"It's the first good record of an American mastodon in Colorado," said Steve Holen, curator of archaeology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. "This is way outside of the range for mastodons. It's the first record we have of more than just one tooth. Finding out these mastodons were living along the Front Range is an important scientific find."
Among other things, the fossil suggests that when the mastodon died, the Front Range had "quite a few trees and brush," Holen said.
Mammoths, giant elephant-like mammals similar in appearance to mastodons, browsed on grass, so their fossils are common in Colorado. But mastodons fed on leaves and branches; their bones are common in Michigan and Ohio and in the Northeast, but rare in the Mountain West.
The site also produced the tooth of a horse that probably last galloped about 100,000 years ago.
The find has excited the boys quite a bit. Neither of them had an interest in the bones of extinct animals before their big discovery on June 1.
"Now, I definitely find them interesting, and I know how important it is to find something like that," said Jake, a seventh-grader at Deer Creek Middle School.
"It's a lot more cool for me now," said Tyler, who is in eighth grade at Falcon Bluffs Middle School. "All of this stuff is buried there, and you would never know it."
The path from mandible to scientific excavation was not exactly straight.
The day the boys found the mandible, in an area of the stream popular with Ken-Caryl Ranch neighborhood kids, they took it home and got on the Internet. When they found a picture of a mastodon tooth — the mandible's most recognizable component was a tooth — they knew what they had.
The mandible lived for a spell in a cardboard box in a sink beside the washing machine in Jake's house. Then, it moved to the fireplace mantle in Tyler's house.
Eventually, the boys took a photo of the fossil and Tyler's father e-mailed it to Holen, who immediately knew it belonged to a mastodon.
He met the boys at the stream and suggested they examine the area for more mastodon bones. Tyler waded into the water and trudged to the bank, where he reached down and began feeling around. He touched something smooth, tore off a chunk, and held it up for Holen's inspection.
"It was a piece of tusk," said Holen. "I said, 'Is that still in place?' He said, 'Yes.' I got in the water and sure enough, there was the tusk poking out of the bank. Tyler has an amazing knack for finding things, I guess."
That exploration led to a later date, when a group of scientists visited the site and excavated the rest of the tusk. The fossils now sit in the Denver Museum of Nature & Science; one day they could be on display.
Holen said the rest of the mastodon — a species that typically stood nearly 10 feet tall at the shoulder, was covered in shaggy hair and became extinct about 10,000 years ago — is probably buried nearby.
Excavating the skeleton would be expensive.
Holen said the museum is "debating" whether to launch a fundraising drive to help pay for removing the rest of the bones from the stream.
The boys' find did not fatten their wallets. But Holen said because they found the bones, they get to name the site. They haven't come up with anything yet. If all goes as planned, though, the boys will have more opportunities to attach their names to fossil digs.
"We were just thinking about walking up and down that stream and looking at the side of the banks to see if we see anything," said Tyler. "That would be fun."
Douglas Brown: 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
Douglas J. Brown