The Mysterious Mastodon

In a black-and-white photograph bearing the fade of age, five men stand in a deep pit. Four of them are clad in workmen’s clothes, while the fifth, standing slightly in front of the others, is dressed in a bow tie and vest. In his right hand, stretching from shoulder to knee, is a massive bone with a large chunk missing from one end.

That bone, the femur of an ice-age behemoth, would become the smoking gun.

The photograph first arrived at the UW’s Geology Museum a decade ago, brought in by a curious visitor hoping to learn the whereabouts of the old bone. The visitor’s ancestor owned the now-gone farm where it was found more than a century ago, and the photo had survived the ages.

But museum staff lacked an answer; their only collection of similar bones belonged to the Boaz mastodon — perhaps Wisconsin’s most famous fossil. Based on the ages of its bones, it was thought to represent one of the last mastodons standing in the Midwest after the glaciers retreated from the Great Lakes region. A feature of the museum since 1915, the ancient skeleton has helped put Boaz, Wisconsin, on the map. A historical marker erected in 1995 sits at the site where the mastodon remains were found.

Yet words handwritten on the back of the photograph offered a clue: “Hole where mastodon bones were discovered on the farm of J.W. Anderson in the 1890ties [sic] at Anderson Mills, Wisconsin. I am not sure but that may be my Grandpa Anderson standing in the hole holding the large bone. Pictures from W Paul Dietzman grandson.”

More photographs, also inscribed by Dietzman, documented a treasure trove of mastodon ribs, vertebrae, teeth, and much more. There was little doubt that the elephantlike creature from the Pleistocene — the geologic time period encompassing the most recent ice age, which ended 11,700 years ago — had been found on the farm, around the same time as the Boaz discovery. But the bones in the photos were nowhere to be found. And that femur, with that large piece broken off, was distinctive.

For years, the bones remained a mystery.

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In 2013, Geology Museum curator Carrie Eaton MS’04 was hungry for a good project. She realized the museum was two short years from the centennial of the Boaz mastodon’s mounting — first at Science Hall and later moved to its current location at Weeks Hall — so she embarked on what she thought would be an easy journey to reinvigorate its story. She could not have been more wrong.

“This whole project started off as this tiny little thread that I started yanking,” she says. “And the sweater kept getting bigger, and I just kept pulling and pulling, and we discovered more, and it got more interesting and complicated.”

Early on, Eaton enlisted the help of David Null, director of the UW Archives, which catalogs the vast array of files, books, photographs, and other rich materials that preserve the university’s long and storied past. Together, the two began digging through boxes heavy with records: accession ledgers, correspondence among university leaders, geology department scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, and more.

They came upon minutes from a May 1900 meeting of the UW Board of Regents, which noted a request for $250 for “the purpose of properly mounting a mastodon’s bones now belonging to the University.” But in June, the motion was voted down, and the record of the mastodon went quiet for more than a decade, with the bones lying somewhere in the bowels of Science Hall, forgotten and collecting dust.

In October 1913, C.K. Leith 1897, PhD1901, chair of the geology department, wrote to E.A. Birge, then dean of natural history and the College of Arts and Sciences, asking that $500 be allotted to mount “the mastodon remains found in Richland County which for years have been stored in Science Hall.” Boaz is located in Richland County.

Leith was following up on a letter to Birge written by Maurice Mehl, a recently hired paleontologist who wanted to mount the remains, in part to promote his field. “The work of restoration here in the [geology] department will do much to arouse interest among students and others in paleontology,” Leith wrote. “It is peculiarly fitting also that the Geological Museum should have an actual representative of one of the big animals that formerly roamed through this part of Wisconsin. It should be of considerable interest to visitors and to the state.”

Eaton and Null kept digging, and they soon found a letter, dated July 29, 1898, from Birge to the regents. “The heavy rains of last week washed out portions of the skeleton of a mastodon on a ravine not far from Fennimore, Wisconsin,” Birge wrote. The Anderson farm was located near Fennimore, about thirty miles southwest of Boaz. “I directed Mr. Buckley, Assistant on the Geological Survey, to go down … and investigate the matter. He found a considerable number of bones and purchased them for $75. … The price which he paid was moderate, as the bones are worth, at a low estimate, three times as much as those for which the Department of Geology paid $50 last year.” The only entry recording a purchase of a mastodon — for $50 — referred to bones from Boaz, which Eaton found in the geology department ledger dated January 1898. But the university, it seemed, paid for two different sets of mastodon bones.

The letter also noted that Charles Van Hise 1879, 1880, MS1882, PhD1892, a geology professor who later became university president, was interested in “accumulating enough” bones to “make a complete skeleton,” indicating a willingness to combine mastodon bones for one display.

The yellowed letters represented a pivotal moment for Eaton. They suggested that the Boaz mastodon — standing proud all those years in the museum — might actually be a composite from multiple creatures. She and Rich Slaughter, director of the Geology Museum, knew that pulling out the old Dietzman photographs was a critical step.

What they discovered next took Eaton’s breath away.