At the American Museum 
Mastodon Memories 
In the Hall of Late Mammals at the 
American Museum of Natural History, 
four mastodon and mammoth skele- 
tons parade single file down the center 
aisle. The most famous of this quartet is 
the third skeleton in line. Called the 
Warren Mastodon after the scientist 
who eventually acquired it, it is the re- 
mains of a beast that wandered along 
the shores of the Hudson River perhaps 
ten or twenty thousand years ago. The 
animal came to an untimely end in 
what is now Orange County, New 
York, by venturing too far into a soggy 
bed of peat and shell marl. 
The skeleton was discovered in 1845 
on Nathaniel Brewster’s farm in East 
Coldenham. The summer that year was 
dry and hot, and many small ponds re- 
ceded, leaving peat bogs that the local 
farmers began digging up to fertilize 
their fields. On the Brewster farm one 
large pond had dried up, and the enter- 
prising farmer hired a gang of workmen 
to cut the peat and marl and spread it 
on his fields. The men had dug about 
three feet into the bog when one of 
them struck something hard. Further 
digging revealed a four-foot-long skull 
with a pair of gracefully curving ivory 
tusks. Brewster called in A.J. Prime, a 
doctor living in nearby Newburgh, who 
sped down to the Brewster farm in his 
carriage to supervise the excavation. As 
the workmen dug, they gradually ex- 
posed the beautifully preserved skele- 
ton of a mastodon, standing upright 
just as it had sunk into the mire thou- 
sands of years ago. The skeleton’s posi- 
tion gave an indication of the unfor- 
tunate animal’s final moments: its legs 
were thrust forward and slightly apart, 
and its skull was tilted upward as if 
straining for a last breath of air. 
Unlike most mastodon and mam- 
moth bones, which turn black over 
time, the bones of this mastodon were 
only slightly stained, giving them a rich 
brown coloration — “like old human 
bones,” one paleontologist wrote. Al- 
though its flesh had decayed and van- 
ished, the contents of its stomach 
remained. In one of the numerous sci- 
entific articles he later wrote, Prime de- 
scribed the discovery of the stomach: 
In the midst of the ribs, embedded in the 
marl and unmixed with shells or carbonate 
of lime, was a mass of matter, composed 
principally of the twigs of trees broken into 
pieces of about two inches in length, and 
varying in size from very small twigs to half 
an inch in diameter. There was mixed in 
with these a large quantity of finer vegetable 
substance, like finely divided leaves; the 
whole amounting to from four to six bush- 
els. From the appearance of this, and its sit- 
uation, it was supposed to be the contents of 
the stomach; and this opinion was con- 
firmed on removing the pelvis, underneath 
which, in the direction of the last of the in- 
testines, was a train of the same material, 
about three feet in length [and] four inches 
in diameter. 
The delighted Prime had the bones 
carried to the Brewster barn, and 
neighbors recall him working for weeks 
in the gloom of the barn, carefully fit- 
ting and wiring the bones together. In 
classic nineteenth-century fashion, the 
resultant mounted skeleton went on 
tour, stopping at small New England 
and New York towns, where it drew 
crowds of amazed viewers. The original 
tusks had crumbled on exposure to the 
air, so the mastodon was fitted with a 
large pair of fakes. 
The Warren Mastodon was only one 
find in a series of discoveries ranging 
back to 1705, when Governor Dudley 
of New York wrote to that famous Pu- 
ritan Cotton Mather about several 
mastodbn bones and teeth that had 
been found near Albany. In 1782, the 
first Orange County mastodon bones 
were unearthed on a farm outside New- 
burgh. George Washington made a spe- 
cial trip to see these bones during his 
sojourn at Newburgh in the winter of 
1782-83. In 1802, a complete skeleton 
on John Masten’s farm near Newburgh 
was excavated by Charles Willson 
Peale and his sons Rembrandt and Ti- 
tian. For years, Peale exhibited the 
mounted skeleton in his museum in 
Philadelphia, and then apparently the 
entire creature was lost. 
The Warren Mastodon was the fifth 
complete skeleton found in Orange 
County. In An Outline History of Or- 
ange County, published one year after 
that find, Samuel W. Eager wrote a 
glowing account of mastodon discover- 
ies in the area: 
We cannot, without disrespect to the mem- 
ory of a lost but giant race, and slighting the 
widespread reputation of old Orange as the 
mother of the most perfect and magnificent 
specimens of terrestrial animals, omit to tell 
of the mastodon. Contemplating his re- 
mains as exhumed from their resting place 
for unknown ages, we instinctively think of 
his great and lordly mastery over the 
beasts — of his majestic tread as he strode 
these valleys and hilltops — of his anger 
when excited to fury — stamping the earth 
till trembling beneath his feet — snuffing the 
wind with disdain, and uttering his wrath in 
tones of thunder, — and the mind quails be- 
neath the oppressive grandeur of the 
thought, and we feel as if driven along by 
the violence of a tornado. When the pres- 
sure of contemplation has subsided and we 
recover from the blast, we move along and 
ponder on the time when the mastodon 
lived, — when and how he died, and the na- 
ture of the catastrophe that extinguished the 
race; and the mind again becomes bewil- 
dered and lost in the uncertainty of the 
cause. . . . 
Were they pre-Adamites, and did they 
graze upon the fields of Orange and bask in 
the sunlight of that early period of the 
globe? — or were they antediluvian, and car- 
ried to a common grave by the deluge of the 
Scriptures? — or were they postdiluvian 
only, and till very recent periods wandered 
over our hills and fed in these valleys. . . . 
In 1846, John Warren, a professor of 
anatomy at Harvard College, bought 
the mastodon discovered on the Brew- 
ster farm for $5,000. He had it crated 
and shipped to Boston and hired N.B. 
Shurtleff to remount it for display in his 
small paleontological collection. A 
number of famous nineteenth-century 
scientists came to view the specimen, 
including Louis Agassiz and the Eng- 
lish geologist Sir Charles Lyell. Appar- 
ently, Warren was not happy with 
Shurtleffs mounting, because three 
years later he hired a Mr. Ogden to dis- 
mantle and completely remount the 
skeleton. Ogden had his own ideas 
about what a fossil should look like, 
and he painted the bones with a thick 
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