The American Museum Journal 
Vou. VII OCTOBER, 1907 No. 6 
THE WARREN MASTODON. 
AN page 90 we present an illustration showing the Warren 
Mastodon, Mastodon Americanus, as installed in the 
Hall of Vertebrate Paleontology. This famous skeleton, 
the most complete which has been found, was discovered 
during the unusually dry summer of 1845 on the farm of 
Mr. N. Brewster in a small valley near Newburgh, N. Y. 
The bones were in an almost perfect state of preservation, and from 
the fact that they were buried in a layer of shell-marl, they were not 
black, like most mastodon bones, but brown, like those of a recent 
skeleton which has been much handled. 
The bones were exhibited for three or four months during the same 
year in the city of New York and in several New England towns and 
were then purchased by John Collins Warren, M. D., who was a dis- 
tinguished professor of anatomy in Harvard University from 1815 to 
1847. In 1846 the skeleton was mounted, under Professor Warren’s 
direction, by N. B. Shurtleff, in Boston, and exhibited to Sir Charles Lyell, 
Professor Jeffries Wyman, Professor Louis Agassiz and thousands 
of visitors. In January, 1849, it was remounted and placed with other 
collections in the fire-proof building on Chestnut Street, Boston, sub- 
sequently known as the Warren Museum, which was erected expressly 
for it. Here it remained till 1906, when it was acquired with the re- 
mainder of the Warren collection of fossils and presented to the Ameri- 
can Museum by J. Pierpont Morgan, Esq., as was noted in the JOURNAL 
for April, 1906. 
A year has been devoted to the work of renewing and remounting. 
‘The skeleton was taken apart and the dark varnish with which the 
bones had been covered was removed by the use of alcohol. ‘Thus the 
original color of the time of discovery has been regained. The tusks were 
erroneously reported to Professor Warren as being more than 11 feet 
in length, and were so described and restored by him; but the original 
length has been exactly determined by skillfully piecing the fragments 
together as 8 feet 6 inches. Twenty-three inches of each tusk is inserted 
91 
