﻿NO. 7 SMITHSONIAN EXPLORATIONS, I926 49 



Other parts of the skeleton. None of this material however, is sufifi- 

 ciently complete to form the basis of a successful skeleton restora- 

 tion. It was therefore with renewed hope of realizing this desire for 

 a mountable skeleton of one of these great elephants that a message 

 was received, in the early autumn of the present year, from the 

 Venice Company of Venice, Florida, reporting the discovery near that 

 place of a mammoth skeleton. A cordial invitation to the Smith- 

 sonian to send and secure this specimen for the Institution's col- 

 lections accompanied this report, and as this seemed sufficiently 

 promising to warrant investigation, Dr. James W. Gidley, assistant 

 curator, division of fossil vertebrates, was detailed to go to Venice 

 for that purpose. Arriving there on the morning of the first day 

 of November, Dr. Gidley was occupied for the next lo days with 

 collecting the fossil, and with studying the geological formations in 

 its vicinity. 



A preliminary examination revealed the fact that the bones all 

 belonged to one individual but that the skeleton was by no means 

 complete. However, the specimen was very far from valueless, and 

 the portions remaining were of sufficient value to amply repay the 

 time and expense required to collect and preserve them. Among 

 the more important pieces obtained are the lower jaws including the 

 teeth, both upper cheek-teeth, considerable portions of both tusks 

 and many of the more important bones of the feet. 



These pieces show that this mammoth, or extinct elephant, had 

 been an animal of very large size. In life it would have stood at 

 least 12 feet high at the shoulders and it carried a pair of great 

 incurving tusks which were eight inches in diameter and. measured 

 around the curves, were each lo feet or more in length. 



The location of this find is the north bank of the main drainage 

 canal of the Venice Company at a point about four miles east of the 

 Venice Hotel. The bones were first discovered by Mr. J. W. Parker, 

 a farmer living in the vicinity, while walking along the water's edge 

 after the subsidence of an unusually heavy freshet which had filled 

 the canal to overflowing and had caused heavy caving of its banks. 

 It was this caving that had brought the bones fully to view. It also 

 broke up and destroyed many of the bones including the skull which 

 evidently had been originally buried there, together with a consid- 

 erable portion of the skeleton. 



This partial skeleton was originally buried about five to six feet 

 below the present surface of the ground in a stratum of sand belong- 

 ing to the Pleistocene or so-called Ice Age. As revealed by the cut 

 made by the canal, this sand deposit lies directly on an older Pleisto- 



