A married couple arrived in Cory Harris’s office in late September, carrying a plain cardboard box about the size of a dictionary. They were excited to open it, and to show Dr. Harris the amazing things inside.
Dr. Harris felt a sense of dread, and he prepared to deliver bad news.
“More often than not, it’s a weird rock,” said Dr. Harris, an archaeologist and chair of the behavioral sciences department at SUNY’s Orange County Community College. “You disappoint people, because they thought it was something really cool. And it’s not.”
The box was opened. What he saw inside — two yellowed teeth from a long-dead mastodon — stirred in Dr. Harris a thrill he hadn’t felt in years.
“I was crazy excited,” said Dr. Harris, 50, who has worked in archaeology for nearly 30 years. “It was the same old-school excitement I felt when I got into this field in the first place.”
The discovery of the remarkably well preserved mastodon jaw was announced Tuesday by the New York State Department of Education, which runs the New York State Museum, where scientists are studying the artifact. Fearful that their home near Scotchtown, N.Y., would be overrun by news crews or treasure hunters, the couple declined to be named or interviewed for this article.
According to Dr. Harris, the mastodon jaw was discovered when the couple noticed something poking out of the grass in their backyard.
At first they thought it was an old baseball. It was not a baseball. A little digging revealed two enormous teeth buried in the soil, just inches below the surface. Realizing that this might be something of scientific importance, the homeowners reached out to Dr. Harris. The authenticity of the teeth was apparent immediately, he said, so he contacted Robert Feranec, director of research and collections at the state museum. In October the two scientists organized a small team to excavate a trench 14 inches deep.
There they found the jaw of an adult mastodon — a cousin to the woolly mammoth, which roamed North America until it went extinct about 10,000 years ago. There were also fragments of a toe and a rib. If the homeowners agree, Dr. Harris and Dr. Feranec hope to return to the yard next summer, after the ground has thawed, to see if more of the mastodon is hidden there.
Because the house does not belong to Dr. Feranec, he has resigned himself to waiting. But it hasn’t been easy.
“It would take me a lot of energy not to dig in my own backyard if I know there’s a mastodon right there,” he said.
While it may be uncommon for homeowners to uncover ice age fossils poking out of their yard, the discovery of mastodon bones in Orange County is not exactly rare. In 1780, a preacher named Robert Annan found a collection of enormous bones on his farm in Wallkill, N.Y. The discovery was deemed so important that Gen. George Washington, then the commander of the Continental Army, left his troops camped at Newburgh, N.Y., and rode 25 miles in a sleigh to see the bones himself.
Washington’s viewing party gathered just a few miles from the backyard where the latest fossils were found.
“The highest concentration of mastodons in the country is in Orange County,” said Dr. Feranec, who counted about 60 findings in the area since colonial times.
Orange County is a popular resting place for mastodons because it not only offered ideal places for the animals to live, but also the right conditions to preserve them after they died. According to Dan Fisher, a professor emeritus of paleontology at the University of Michigan, mastodons arrived in what is now New York State about 14,500 years ago, feeding on pine and spruce needles and twigs in a landscape of boreal forests — and cool, peaty bogs, which could prove deadly to animals that wandered in too deep and drowned.
A sample from the Scotchtown jawbone will be sent to a lab in California for radiocarbon dating, which will determine how long ago the animal died, Dr. Feranec said. He expects he already knows the answer: about 13,000 years ago, like most of the mastodon specimens found in Orange County over the last two and a half centuries. The old yellow teeth could yield other discoveries, Dr. Feranec said, like how far this individual mastodon roamed.
“You don’t get many of these experiences in your life as a paleontologist,” Dr. Feranec said. “You need to savor it.”
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