166 ANIMALS OF THE PAST 



earthed. Not that these are complete skeletons, very 

 far from it, the majority of finds are scattered teeth, 

 crumbling tusks, or massive leg-bones, but still the 

 mastodon is far commoner in the museums of this 

 country than is the African elephant, for at the present 

 date there are a dozen or more of the former to two of 

 the latter, the skeleton of Jumbo in the American Mu- 

 seum of Natural History and a female in the United 

 States National Museum. If one may judge by the 

 abundance of bones, mastodons must have been very 

 numerous in some favored localities such as parts of 

 Michigan, Florida, and Missouri and about Big Bone 

 Lick, Ky. Perhaps the most noteworthy of all deposits 

 is that at Kimmswick, about twenty miles south of St. 

 Louis, where in a limited area Mr. L. W. Beehler ex- 

 humed bones representing several hundred individuals, 

 varying in size from a mere baby mastodon up to the 

 great tusker whose wornout teeth proclaim that he had 

 reached the limit of even mastodonic old age. The spot 

 where this remarkable deposit was found is at the foot of 

 a bluff near the junction of two little streams, and it 

 seems probable that in the days when these were larger 

 the spring floods swept down the bodies of animals that 

 had perished during the winter to ground in an eddy 

 beneath the bluff. Or as the place abounds in springs 

 of sulphur and salt water it may be that this was where 

 the animals assembled during cold weather, just as the 

 moas are believed to have gathered in the swamps of 

 New Zealand, and here the weaker died and left their 

 bones. 



The mastodon must have looked very much like any 

 other elephant, though a little shorter in the legs and 

 much more heavily built than either of the living species, 

 while the head was a trifle flatter and the jaw decidedly 

 longer. The tusks are a variable quantity, sometimes 



