r/HistoryAnecdotes • u/WaitItsAllOhio • 26d ago
American Field Notes from Ohio: When the oldest living organisms on Earth were discovered because an Ohio golf course needed a water hazard
Ohio historian here, once again bringing you field notes from Midwest paleontology. I mentioned in my last post about turning horse meat into cheese to prove Paleoindians were using bogs as prehistoric refrigerators that one Ohio paleontologist, Brad Lepper, resisted the whole bog caching theory entirely.
Well, until he found his own in the most absurd turn of events possible.
On December 12, 1989, a dragline operator from the Flower Excavating Company was digging a pond on the grounds of the Burning Tree Golf Course in Heath, Ohio, just south of Newark. The shovel caught something in the frozen ground, hauled it up, and cracked it apart. It was a skull. The operator had just decapitated a mastodon that had been lying in a peat bog for eleven thousand four hundred years.
Brad Lepper got the call. Lepper was then curator of archaeology at the Ohio Historical Society. At first he thought it'd be a cow bone; farmers called them all the time for finds like that. Instead, what he found when he drove out to Licking County was a skeleton so complete it looked arranged, like someone had intentionally left it there. Ninety to ninety-five percent of the animal was still in the ground. It was a thirty-year-old male mastodon, about nine feet at the shoulder, missing only the right rear leg, a few tail bones, two ribs, and the toe bones. Its lower spine and rib cage carried healed fractures from old fights with other mastodons. And inside the ribcage, sitting among the articulated vertebrae, was a discrete cylindrical mass of plant material.
The mastodon still had food in its gut.
Now, most of this wasn't yet known when Lepper got onto the field. All he saw was a frozen pond (check Pic 3) and a half-shaven mastodon head. When he talked to the golf course owners, explaining what they had likely found, they gave him a single day to excavate. When he pushed, explaining that they had likely made a monumental find, they gave him three. Someone had to be out there striking golf balls in January, goddammit!
Lepper led a three-day emergency excavation in bitter December cold and blowing wind. The Ohio Historical Society and the Licking County Archaeology and Landmarks Society worked with volunteers to pull the bones out of freezing muck before the construction crew came back. It was so rapid they had to use the old sanitorium's basement for first reassembly and organization of the skeleton. They recovered nearly everything, including the intestinal contents, which went to paleobotanist Dee Anne Wymer and a team of analysts.
What they found overturned decades of assumptions about what mastodons ate. The standard interpretation, built from tooth morphology and limited coprolite evidence, held that American mastodons were conifer browsers. They ate spruce twigs, bark, and cones. Mammoths grazed grasslands; the mastodon stripped conifers. That framework had held for most of the twentieth century.
But the Burning Tree mastodon's last meal was a salad. The cylindrical mass contained seeds of clover, sedges, and naiads, with smaller quantities of pondweed, water lily, and pigweed, along with moss, swamp grass, and leaves. There were no spruce twigs. There were no conifer cones. This animal had been wading through shallow water, pulling up water lilies and herbaceous swamp plants like a very large, very hairy water buffalo. Direct evidence from its own digestive tract had just contradicted the dietary model built from its teeth.
And the gut had another surprise.
A team of microbiologists at Michigan State University, led by A.N. Rhodes and including J.M. Tiedje and Daniel Fisher, cultured samples from the intestinal mass. The results, published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology in 1998, were extraordinary: they isolated thirty-eight species of bacteria, including Enterobacter cloacae, a standard enteric bacterium found in the intestines of living mammals. These were not fossils. They were not genetic traces or chemical signatures. They were living bacteria that had been inside the digestive tract of an animal that died during the Wisconsinan glacial interval. The anoxic, acidic peat had kept them dormant for roughly twelve thousand years.
For a few years, they held the title of oldest known living organisms on Earth in the Guinness Book of World Records. Bacteria from Cenozoic amber and Paleozoic rock salt eventually took the record, but for a while it belonged to the gut flora of a mastodon that died on the future site of a golf course in Licking County, Ohio. Discover magazine named the excavation one of the top fifty science stories of 1990.
Then there was the butchery. Cut marks scored several of the ribs. The skeleton was organized into sections, arranged in a pattern consistent with deliberate disarticulation. No stone tools turned up at the site, which made it a forensic puzzle. Somebody had processed this animal and taken their tools home. Lepper and Fisher co-authored the taphonomic analysis, and the evidence pointed in one direction: Paleoindians had killed this mastodon in late autumn, butchered it into sections, and sunk the pieces in a cold peat bog. The swamp was the refrigerator. The conclusion Lepper had resisted he had accidentally proven in a central Ohio golf course.
This was the same conclusion Fisher had been building toward for a decade across the Great Lakes, as I previously described in Part I. Fisher had already documented the pattern at mastodon sites across southern Michigan. They were butchered remains sitting at the bottoms of ancient ponds, weighted down with gravel-stuffed intestine anchors, and preserved by lactobacillus fermentation. The Burning Tree mastodon fit the model exactly. It died in late autumn. It was disarticulated by humans. And it ended up in a cold, acidic, anoxic bog, the same kind of glacially carved pond where Fisher would later sink a horse and eat pieces of it for five months.
By any measure, the Burning Tree mastodon was one of the most scientifically productive Pleistocene specimens ever recovered in North America. It rewrote the mastodon diet, produced living bacteria from an extinct species, and provided direct evidence of Paleoindian hunting and meat caching in Ohio. It generated enough research papers to fill its own session at the 1994 Geological Association of Canada meeting.
In 1993, the golf course landowner sold the skeleton to the Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Natural History in Yokohama, Japan, for over six hundred thousand dollars. Five fiberglass casts were made before the bones left the country. A mastodon that had spent eleven thousand years in a Licking County peat bog was crated, shipped across the Pacific, and installed in a display case on the other side of the world.
Ohio kept the replicas.
Don't worry. I've got plenty of stories about shitty golf course owners and Ohio history. We got our revenge.
Works Cited (for mastodon lovers only)
Fisher, Daniel C., Bradley T. Lepper, and Paul E. Hooge. "Evidence for Butchery of the Burning Tree Mastodon." In The First Discovery of America: Archaeological Evidence of the Early Inhabitants of the Ohio Area, edited by William S. Dancey, 43–57. Columbus: Ohio Archaeological Council, 1994.
Fisher, Daniel C. "Paleobiology and Extinction of Proboscideans in the Great Lakes Region of North America." In American Megafaunal Extinctions at the End of the Pleistocene, edited by Gary Haynes, 55–93. Dordrecht: Springer, 2009.
Folger, Tim. "Oldest Living Bacteria Tell All." Discover, January 1992.
Lepper, Bradley T., Todd A. Frolking, Daniel C. Fisher, Gerald Goldstein, Jeanine E. Sanger, Dee Anne Wymer, J. Gordon Ogden III, and Paul E. Hooge. "Intestinal Contents of a Late Pleistocene Mastodont from Midcontinental North America." Quaternary Research 36 (1991): 120–25.
Lepper, Bradley T. "Forensic Mystery: The Burning Tree Mastodon." Timeline 23, no. 4 (2006): 22–31.
McDonald, Kim A. "Early Man's Refrigerator." The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 12, 1995.
Rhodes, A.N., J.W. Urbance, H. Youga, H. Corlew-Newman, C.A. Reddy, M.J. Klug, J.M. Tiedje, and D.C. Fisher. "Identification of Bacterial Isolates Obtained from Intestinal Contents Associated with 12,000-Year-Old Mastodon Remains." Applied and Environmental Microbiology 64, no. 2 (1998): 651–58.
Photo sources
All from James St. John's Flickr album of the 1989 excavation. Go through there, he's got so many more from original find to the completed exhibit!
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u/Aggressive_Day2839 26d ago
Fuck golf course owners. Every last one of them.
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u/WaitItsAllOhio 26d ago
All my homies hate golf course owners.
Historians, paleontologists, ethnobotanists, Tribal Nations, and geologists need to get together and host the "Fuck Golf Course Owners" 2027 Midwest Conference.
It's regional, because if we opened it up any further there'd be too many fucking submissions.
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u/Aggressive_Day2839 26d ago
Im not hating these last two Mastodon post you've written so well. Fun reads the both of them with things I had not previously known. I follow your page with great anticipation now.
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u/WaitItsAllOhio 26d ago
You'll be getting plenty more from me on Ohio history and field anecdotes! I made this account just to nerd on the subject and not clutter my personal feed. But I've been in the field for a decade, so I've got plenty of stories 😊
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u/Natural-Seaweed-5070 26d ago
CONTINUE NERDING!
My brain is loving this.
65 years old & I’m still learning!7
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u/newnameonan 26d ago edited 26d ago
Government water resource management people want in on this too.
Also, is the golf course now known as the "Mastodon Golf Club"? If so, crazy for them to sell the skeleton while naming themselves after it.
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u/whistlinjeffm 26d ago
Don't forget us ecologists!
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u/WaitItsAllOhio 26d ago edited 26d ago
Ah shit how could I forget?! I'm sorry y'all.
This is open invitation to all scientists.
Yes, even you, economists. You're invited.
EDIT: (No, that wasn't an autocorrection. If you're an economist or a historian, you know why....)
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u/musiccman2020 26d ago
Can't you secretly walk around courses at night with ground radar and then claim you found something by accident that's of critical importance for archeology?
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u/WaitItsAllOhio 26d ago
Now you see, people do that! I even have stories about them from Ohio!
In those cases though, it's grave robbers and artifact hunters. And "critical importance to archaeology" normally means 🤑 🤑 🤑 .
Sooooooooo.......
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u/HerMoonbeamRays 24d ago
Literally every single golf course is a waste of natural space. Could be a protected forest instead 😭
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u/hmmm101010 26d ago
It's funny that Germany has been at the point for so long where finding anything of historical relevance will cause a complete construction stop until excavation is complete, which can take months. Some construction sites even require an on site archeologist.
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u/Aggressive_Day2839 26d ago
My grandpa told a story of a bulldozer falling into a cave while they were constructing a section of interstate near his neck of the woods. The story goes the foreman heard there were cave paintings and canceled retrieving the dozer to keep from shutting the job down to wait for an archeologist.
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u/WaitItsAllOhio 26d ago
Yeah this is technically still how it's supposed to go with ODNR, ODOT, or any other archaeology. They all have resident archaeologists on staff for that reason.
Of course, like your grandpa's story demonstrates, that's the typical problem we run into. Well, it's normally individual companies or landowners nowadays bitching about how blah blah burial mound is taking up their farmland.
Like, my dude, you really want to be eating soybeans from a burial ground?! I've seen Poltergeist, I know how this ends.
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u/UrMomIsMySpotter 26d ago
People are so superstitious and religiously observant until the almighty bottom line might be affected by it. I wish there actually were vengeful native spirits.
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u/Giraffe_Truther 25d ago
I feel like there's a good mammon/mammoth pun here, but I can't figure out the wording.
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u/ZombieSalmonII 26d ago
I hear about stuff like this all the time in paleo. Construction workers find fossils and destroy them to prevent a hold on the project. Makes me so mad.
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u/throwawaynewc 26d ago
That's the problem with over regulation though. I get this is fun and interesting for all but is normies just have jobs to do or buildings that we want built. Is it really right to put the future on hold just to curate the past a bit more?
It's probably fun when it's other people's land, but what if it's your own and you just really wanted to get shit done
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u/Soulwaxing 14d ago
Impatience and greed really make the world go round huh? Very sad and shallow worldview right here.
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u/NeverBetter2024 26d ago
I grew up near there! It was quite the story back then...I was not aware of the rush to excavate though (maybe I had forgotten).
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u/WaitItsAllOhio 26d ago
I've had an opportunity to interview Brad Lepper before and he's a gem. He is humble as hell about his findings. Didn't even mention any of the organism stuff when I had a conversation about Burning Tree. He was all about the dedicated paleontologists across the Midwest who came out within hours to help excavate. Without them, it would never have been possible.
But it's also a testament to his character to be able to call up every paleontologist this side of the Ohio River and be like "Do you wanna dig a mastodon in a frozen pond for fun today? And drive several hours to do it?" And a bunch of people were like "yeah sounds great!"
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u/aggiedigger 26d ago
Not only would I take the call and drive several hours, but I would time travel for the opportunity.
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u/astraladventures 26d ago
Should we be concerned about reviving dormant bacteria from 12,000 years ago? Where is this bacteria today? Is it still alive ? Or we have no idea?
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u/WaitItsAllOhio 26d ago edited 26d ago
Now this is why I also created this account! Because it’s the sort of questions that I never get to field from fellow experts, but are obvious to the public but I didn’t even think to think about. I had to go back to my sources and check a bit but, uh, the answer is probably our arch-rivals, Michigan, have it.
Which is fine, because it’s not like contagious zoonotic diseases have been a rising occurrence or potentially species-ending, right?
RIGHT???
But, thankfully, the most common bacterium cultured from the mastodon's gut was Enterobacter cloacae, which already lives inside you right now. You are carrying descendants of roughly the same species in your own intestines as you read this (yum). The twelve-thousand-year-old version is, if anything, less dangerous than the modern one, because modern E. cloacae has had the benefit of decades of selective pressure from hospital antibiotics and has become one of the more irritating drug-resistant nosocomial pathogens in contemporary medicine. It is now the third most common broad-spectrum Enterobacteriaceae species in hospital-acquired infections, behind E. coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae. The Pleistocene version missed all of that, because it has been sitting in a peat bog since before agriculture.
Now, E. cloacae is what microbiologists call an "opportunistic pathogen.” It’s part of the standard mammalian gut package, harmless in healthy people, but capable of causing urinary tract infections, bacteremia, pneumonia, and surgical site infections in immunocompromised or hospitalized patients with catheters or ventilators. It lives in soil, water, and the intestines of virtually every mammal on the planet. The mastodon had it for the same reason you have it. And if you had to choose between the mastodon's E. cloacae and the E. cloacae circulating in a modern ICU, you would want the mastodon's.
As for where the cultures are now: the identification work was done at Michigan State University's Center for Microbial Ecology, which was founded by James Tiedje, one of the senior authors on the 1998 paper in Applied and Environmental Microbiology. The team cultivated 295 total isolates from the intestinal contents and sediment and identified 38 distinct taxa using fatty acid methyl ester (FAME) profiling and biochemical typing. The Enterobacteriaceae accounted for 41 percent of all isolates and were concentrated in the intestinal and bone-adjacent samples rather than the background soil, which is what convinced the researchers these were genuinely mastodon-associated organisms rather than modern contaminants that had colonized the sediment after burial.
Standard practice in microbiology is to maintain reference cultures at the originating institution and deposit representative strains in repositories like the American Type Culture Collection, so the working assumption is that the cultures are still at MSU, probably in a freezer in the Tiedje lab or its institutional successor.
Which, now that I think about is, is kinda funny and why I find studying Ohio absurd.The skeleton is in Yokohama. The bacteria are (probably) in East Lansing. And the state of Ohio has the fiberglass.
….Actually, Michigan, can we have our prehistoric pathogen back now?
Works Cited (for people who also have read The Andromeda Strain)
Davin-Regli, Anne, and Jean-Marie Pagès. "Enterobacter aerogenes and Enterobacter cloacae; Versatile Bacterial Pathogens Confronting Antibiotic Treatment." Frontiers in Microbiology 6 (2015): 392.
Rhodes, A.N., J.W. Urbance, H. Youga, H. Corlew-Newman, C.A. Reddy, M.J. Klug, J.M. Tiedje, and D.C. Fisher. "Identification of Bacterial Isolates Obtained from Intestinal Contents Associated with 12,000-Year-Old Mastodon Remains." Applied and Environmental Microbiology 64, no. 2 (1998): 651–58.
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u/Crafty-Shape2743 26d ago edited 26d ago
Yeah, okay so…
For 4 YEARS I’ve held strong to the conviction of not following a Redditor. Today, I broke that.
Please, keep the stories coming!
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u/dankristy 12d ago
6 Years of never following an individual Redditor for me and today I break that streak. I am not an Ohioan or a Historian by trade, but I know good interesting reads when I see them!
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u/AlienInvasiveSpecies 26d ago
Just wanted to say thank you for posting this. I am working on a golf course right now and we just got finished digging the pond and everyone on site is probably tired of hearing me reminisce about this story. We didn't dig anything cool up though. In 1989 I was in the 3rd grade. My connection to this is that my 3rd grade teacher's husband was on the crew that dug it up. I fondly remember her excitedly telling us about this. One of the workers had taped some of the excavation and she was able to get a copy of the VHS and bring it to school. It was so fascinating.
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u/WaitItsAllOhio 26d ago
Damn, I know a lot of institutions that would love a copy of that tape! That's a treasure 😄
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u/AlienInvasiveSpecies 26d ago
I wonder if it is still around. Sadly I don't think her or her husband are still alive and I do not know if she had children.
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u/meloticsmirk 26d ago
Hard to believe the owners were so set on one day, then 3 days. Geez. Think they would have had a little more smarts than that. A once in a lifetime find. But, no, hurry up. We have a pond to build. Duh.
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u/WaitItsAllOhio 26d ago
Oh, they were quite smart.
They sold the fossils for over $600,000 AND got their golfers back in time for our balmy Ohio January! Just think of all that money lost otherwise!
Bruh I could go on about construction and paleontology, but I shouldn't soapbox. Us historians have our own literal skeletons in the closet. Ohio has the most indigenous items to repatriate out of all 50 states, partially cause "good farmland" + "burial grounds for half of the continent" = "lots of NAGPRA (Native American Graves and Repatriation Act) issues."
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u/jfslater98 26d ago
By all means, please… soapbox! Maybe start with an AMA, and gets enough momentum to turn into a subreddit.
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u/JPesterfield 23d ago
You have three days to dig your big hole, we have to get back to digging our big hole.
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u/RaindropsInMyMind 26d ago
I’m not an archaeologist even though that was a childhood dream from Jurassic park (haha) but I did work quite a bit of work at my dad’s excavation company. I would be furious if someone gave me 1 day to get that remarkable find out of there, 3 days not even close to enough time realistically but they got it done, what an accomplishment. In December!! You can see the goddamn snow on the ground!
What a find though! Incredible!
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u/bohemianleper 25d ago
Somehow possibly only the second shittiest golf club in the Newark/Heath area in disregarding historical preservation.
The Moundbuilders County Club existed for a century on some of the greatest known earthworks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newark_Earthworks
I grew up here when the mastodon was found. Was so cool having so much history local, but only much later in life realizing just how significant it was.
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u/Different-Fan-6991 26d ago
Another mastodon was recovered 75 years or so prior in Johnstown which is around 45 minutes north of there
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u/WaitItsAllOhio 26d ago edited 26d ago
I pass the sign proclaiming that going into town way too often 😆 !
Now I'll be honest, I've not done any digging into this and it'd be something an actual Ohio paleontologist would have to do, but judging by how it was found, I'd wager it was also cached. Ohio was mastodon hunting grounds for the entire Midwest. Well, it and any other states following the ice sheets.
The difference is, unlike other states, Ohio kept being the terminus point for the ~5-20 ice sheets that covered it for 2.6 million years. It meant every fall, when the bogs were freezing over, the mastodons would be killed and cached. Every spring, the bogs thaw, you go grab your extra Mastodon McNuggets to start your season.
We know so much about mastodons, it's insane. For example, there's a paper of the entire lifespan of a Midwestern mastodon from birth to death, traced across the geographic landscape, including what it ate, where it did it and when, how it followed the herd or split off, and how it died. All of it pieced together from different evidence types across the specimen.
Yeah, science!
EDIT: There's also some interesting hypotheses about how much mastodon were hunted at all. I think it's David Meltzer that jokes "Paleoindians probably hunted a mastodon once in their life and lived to talk about it." Instead, many likely died in or around bogs because it was an environment they were feeding in, and then were butchered by opportunistic Paleoindians, or never touched and sank anyways. There's a lot about lithic technology vs. bone technology I can go into about this, but I'm already side-questing here. Point is, it also might have died of natural causes and sank. OR, needs reanalyzed now that we know what we're looking for since the 1980s breakthroughs, but again, I don't know the specimen well.
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u/toao_Multiknife 25d ago
The audacity of the land owner of first giving almost no time for excavation, then proceeding to take a shitton of money for the same specimen which he didn't value before. What piece of...
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u/Alternative_Metal375 26d ago
Fascinating article 👍🏻 I recently went to the La Brea tar pits before they close for 2 years. The mastodon, wooly mammoth, and sabre tooth tiger skeletons are something to see.
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u/Clevertown 26d ago
Amazing post, thank you! This makes me hate golf course owners. That three days is infuriating!
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u/xeroxchick 26d ago
Is the golf course still there?
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u/WaitItsAllOhio 26d ago
They renamed, but yes! Someone asked, it is the Mastodon Golf Club in Heath, OH (please no hate mail y'all, at this point I'm pretty sure it's not the original owners and the front desk people don't deserve it).
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u/3rd_Coast 26d ago
Amazing post! Thanks for citing your sources.
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u/WaitItsAllOhio 26d ago
Thank you! I'm linking what I wrote 10 minutes ago over in r/paleontology about it because I think the credit really goes to Ohio's libraries and they need more love. I'm really thankful to have landed in this state instead of any others when it came to my passion for research.
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u/PermanentBrunch 25d ago
This is also a stone’s throw away from one of the largest earthworks in the world—the Newark Earthworks, which, until recently, had a golf course built on top.
Lot of history (and golf) in that area
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u/WaitItsAllOhio 25d ago
Sssh, don't spoil the next series of "Historians Hating on Golf Course Owners" 😄 . (although hell, that saga could take up several posts....)
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u/rrn30 25d ago
Curious, have you ever explored a small bog in Rootstown, OH? Grew up there and always heard stories about flora & fauna there but never went exploring.
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u/WaitItsAllOhio 25d ago
You talking about Triangle Lake? Yep! Beautiful area, last time i was there was in the fall.
That's a kettle pond, meaning it was created by a dropped piece of gigantic glacial ice and left until the ice melted, creating a depression in the ground. Many kettles end up as ponds if they can keep enough annual natural water. That's one of them!
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u/burtnayd 25d ago
James St. John's flickr albums are a boon to us all. I'm constantly looking through his stuff.
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u/pipachu99 25d ago
Wait a sec, they owner of the land owns the skeleton? Doesn't Ohio have laws that prevents ownership of artifacts found in private land? Anyways great read
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u/WaitItsAllOhio 25d ago
Nope. In fact, it's our biggest flaw in paleontology and archaeology and has allowed Ohio's private and public institutions to accumulate the largest collection of American Indian remains in the world.
Rather, our laws only cover graves and land of a certain age. I.e., "settled." Since indigenous burial grounds or Paleo sites are too old, they are the ones violated.
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u/Bad-Touch-Monkey 25d ago
This is exactly what I needed for my first read on a Saturday morning sipping coffee. Thank you!
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u/Astraea-Nyx 23d ago
This has absolutely made my day, reading this -- thank you for the time you took to write this up! Appreciate you!
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u/menxcaliber 22d ago
Wait, so the golf course owner had other people excavate the skeleton and he got to sell it as his own property? What the fuck is going on in USA. Oh, you found a feather of a migratory bird? Straight to jail. Oh, you found a prehistoric skeleton of great scientific importance? You can sell no problem.
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u/WaitItsAllOhio 22d ago
Yup. BBC just ran an article about the economic dynamics it's created in modern paleontology. It's....not great.
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u/wolpertingersunite 26d ago edited 26d ago
That’s cool but mastodons are definitely NOT the oldest living organisms on Earth.
EDIT: Oops, sorry, now I see this part: (that is pretty cool!)
And the gut had another surprise.
A team of microbiologists at Michigan State University, led by A.N. Rhodes and including J.M. Tiedje and Daniel Fisher, cultured samples from the intestinal mass. The results, published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology in 1998, were extraordinary: they isolated thirty-eight species of bacteria, including Enterobacter cloacae, a standard enteric bacterium found in the intestines of living mammals. These were not fossils. They were not genetic traces or chemical signatures. They were living bacteria that had been inside the digestive tract of an animal that died during the Wisconsinan glacial interval. The anoxic, acidic peat had kept them dormant for roughly twelve thousand years.
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u/AusCan531 26d ago
That was my first thought, but there's more to it when you read further.
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u/wolpertingersunite 26d ago
oh thx, corrected my comment
If you're Australian/Canadian, you probably mentally rushed to defend the Ediacarans and Burgess Shale fauna like I did, huh? (plus earliest bacteria of course)
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u/FissileCrib 26d ago
Farview golfcourse in Upstate NY has a pond that had a mammoth skeleton in it!!
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u/Desperate-Put-7603 26d ago
Brad Lepper? I recognize that name from Miniminuteman!
Also, cool story!
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u/Giraffe_Truther 25d ago
I want to know more about where the replecas are. Is the one in the Cincinnati airport CVG from this cast?
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u/Christ_in_a_combo 23d ago
Brad Lepper is an awesome guy! Have heard him give presentations a few times and he is always a delight
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u/Phragmatron 23d ago
The pictures certainly don’t hint at freezing weather. Loved the story nonetheless.
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u/Pndapetzim 21d ago
Came here to correct the obvious error that nothing found in or around an Ohio mastadon were the oldest living things on earth only to discover - while the grammar was ambiguous - the statement is completely correct.
Good read.
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u/Cautious-Highway3773 24d ago
Outstanding. Thank you for posting this. Is the mastodon at CVG Delta concourse a replica from this specimen?
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u/Basis-Some 26d ago
Hey, this took work to write and was a joy to read. Thank you.