What is now the American Midwest was once home to an American Mastodon. He came back to the area in northeast Indiana every year for a long time. He was killed in battle.
The location of the mastodon's life and how he died were recovered by studying his tusk. One of the ancient elephant relatives that lived in North America before they went extinct is offered new insight by their techniques.
There is a mastodon on display at the Indiana State Museum. His tusks record an animal's entire life history and allow scientists to glean information from specific days, weeks or years. Scientists were able to sample areas within its tusk from adolescence to adulthood to determine how its migration changed over time.
The tusks were the focus of this detective work. The author of the study described strontium as leaving signals all over the landscape.
Strontium is found in the soil and water. Plants use those isotopic signatures as they absorb those nutrients. Our mastodon would eat those plants and leave a mark on his body.
A map of how strontium isotopes change across terrain is the next step in interpreting geographical references. The map was created by one of the study's co-authors, and was built upon the work of other scientists.
Fred migrated from one season to another. He drank from nearby ponds and streams when the season was recorded by the atmospheric isotopes.
The team was able to figure out the movement of the animal.
From his 29th to his 32nd year, things changed a lot for this mastodon. He was moving over a long distance with injuries. He returned to northeast Indiana every year, even though he never explored the area in his adolescence. He had injuries in the late spring and early summer, which might have been a sign that it was a mate.
Pits on the surface of a mastodon's tusk are just one of the injuries left behind. The internal mark left by those injuries is also visible.
The pits were formed in places where the tusk was jammed into the back of the bone. The tusk jams back into the sockets where it grows out of the skull when a man thrusts it at an opponent. The internal growth of the tusk is affected by this.
The team suspected he was going through musth, a time of aggression seen in modern male elephants, when sparring with other males is a frequent occurrence.
During that same season, he suffered a mortal craniofacial injury.
The methods that they are using are part of a larger trend in paleontology to add more detail to the behavior and ecology of these animals. It is the first time that we have had this data.
There is a question as to whether the migration patterns and injuries are representative of all mastodons. The team wants to study the fossils of mastodons.
What did the migration patterns of female mastodons look like? There were different mating grounds for the different proboscideans. Dr. Miller wondered if they went to the same place and it was just a crazed region of hormonally- charged proboscideans.
Dr. Miller went back to the team's discoveries about the specimen.
He said, "I think it's just so deeply, deeply exciting that we can begin to understand some of the fundamental aspects of the biology of an individual."
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