ELSAH, Ill. – Long before there was a Great River Road, about 27,000-and-a-half years ago, a mastodon once stood atop the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River. Faculty and students at Principia College have discovered the specimen.
“It was also smaller than the skull would be,” says Andrew Martin, chair of the Sociology and Anthropology Department at Principia College, pointing to parts of a mastodon skull. “What you have is here one set and another tooth on this side and two teeth on this side. And each tooth weighs about a pound.”
A Bobcat, a piece of modern equipment, discovered the mammoth when it was digging up some dirt for use on some roadways.
Now, the students and faculty are painstakingly working to uncover the tusk, teeth, and who knows what more lies underground.
“Say we find a new bone,” sophomore Jeremiah Williams said. “We take this and point it at the bone and then shoot a laser at that bone and it will map it out. And we have an iPad, and it gives us a good scan of where it’s at.”
What can only be best described as an earthy, dirt smell.
They’ll work on Thursday from 2 p.m. until 4 p.m. trying to uncover the mastodon, believed to have been killed by a strike of lightning.
“We’ve used mostly trowels…,” junior Ernesto Botero said. “We use it to scrape. It’s a slow process.”