Mastodon Remains in Ohio. 153 



As the greater portion of the western half of the State was covered 

 with swamps and morasses, immediately after the glacial period or 

 " great ice age,'' the vast amount of succulent herbage afforded by the 

 soni-aqueous surface must have rendered Ohio somewhat of a mastodon 

 paradise. In no other State have so many fossil, not petrified, remains 

 of the mastodon been found as in Ohio, and it is perhaps no great 

 exaggeration to state that in every twenty-acre swamp some remains 

 of one of these gigantic mammalia may be found in westei-n Ohio. 



Nearly fifty years ago, the remains of one of these now extinct animals 

 were exhumed in digging the canal, near the town of Massillon, in 

 Stark county. I never saw this skeleton, but a gentleman who assisted in 

 exhuming it told me that the tusks measured more than 11 feet in 

 length, and were fully 8 inches in diameter at the base. About the 

 same time, the tusks, vertebrae, and some other portions of a skeleton 

 were taken out of a marl pit in Medina county — the tusks were 12 feet 

 long. About forty years ago, a complete skeleton was exhumed in 

 Crawford county, and, if I have been correctly informed, the same 

 skeleton is now in the British Museum. A few years since, a nearly 

 complete skeleton was dug up in the immediate vicinity of Cleveland, 

 but was destroyed on the spot by the workmen, who broke all the 

 bones into fine i)ieces. Near Sandusky, a tusk of one was exhumed ; 

 a portion of this tusk is now in the museum of the Homeopathic College, 

 in Cleveland, At Fort McArthur, in Hardin county, a considerable 

 portion of a skeleton was exhumed. These remains were evidently 

 drifted out of the Scioto marsh, they being found scattered over a 

 considerable area. In 1869, w^hilst ditching in his meadow, W. A. 

 Howard, of Woodstock, Champaign county, dug up a femur in a most 

 excellent state of preservation, together with small ribs and bones 

 of the feet as w^ell preserved. This femur was for several years on 

 exhibition in the State Agricultural Rooms, in Columbus. In 1870, in 

 digging a township ditch in Clay township, Augusta county, near the 

 village of St. Johns, an entire skeleton was found standing ui>right, 

 but sunk down in the surrounding muck, so that the vertebra? were 

 several feet below the surface. The skeleton was complete when 

 found, but the tusks, spine, cranium, and some other portions, were so 

 completely decayed that they crumbled when the attempt was made to 

 remove them. The lower jaws, teeth of the upper jaw, radius, ulna, 

 humerus, tibia, fibula and femur, bones of the feet and some of the 

 ribs, were in a sufficiently good state of preservation to be removed. 

 A portion of these remains are in the High School building, at Wapa- 

 konetta. A tusk and some bones were reported to have been found 

 near Greenville, in Darke county, but I was never able to obtain any 



