The Mastodon: Illinois' Patriotic Proboscideans

Illinois was once home to the shaggy, elephant-like mastodon, whose monstrous size gave America and a founding father pride in the young country’s natural history.

Illinois’ state flag with a prehistoric twist.

THIS WEEK IS ILLINOIS FOSSIL WEEK ON NATURAL CURIOS. OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS, YOU’LL MEET ONE OF THE STRANGEST CREATURES TO EVER EVOLVE, GIANT, SHAGGY ELEPHANT-LIKE ANIMALS THAT ONCE STOMPED ACROSS THE STATE AND INSPIRED THOMAS JEFFERSON, AND SOME OF THE LARGEST FOSSILS IN THE WORLD THAT CURRENTLY RESIDE AT CHICAGO’S FIELD MUSEUM.

Illinois’ contemporary wildlife is relatively paltry in comparison to its storied past. Bison, elk and mountain lions have been erased from the Land of Lincoln for a century. Black bears used to be plentiful throughout the state until 1870.  Since 2008, there have only been three black bear sightings in Illinois. Today the largest animals you will see are white-tailed deer and coyotes.

But not too far in the past, giants lumbered through the ancient forests of modern-day Illinois. Around the size of an African elephant, the mastodon was a hulking browser with long, straight tusks and a flatter skull than its modern, distant relatives. The American mastodon (Mammut americanum) roamed Illinois and the rest of the Eastern United States from 3.75 million years ago to around 10,000 years ago, recent enough to inspire Native American legends of immense beasts bulldozing their way through the forest.

The Field Museum’s mastodon skeleton.

The creature’s colossal remains also captured the imagination of early European settlers to the United States. A massive mastodon tooth was discovered in New York in 1705. The tooth was eventually transported to London and rightfully labeled as a tooth from a “giant”. The fearsome creature that the gargantuan tooth belonged to became known as the incognito, or unknown animal, and was thought to be 70 feet tall by some sources. Although it may seem silly today, the creature’s incredible actual size (only 10 feet tall at the shoulder) became a sense of extreme national pride, especially to America’s third president.

For years Thomas Jefferson engaged in a bitter debate with the French naturalist, Georges-Louis Leclerc, over which continent had the bigger animals. Leclerc claimed that geographical factors in North America caused the North American animals to become “degenerate” compared to the elephants and lions of the old country. Jefferson was so incensed by the naturalist’s disparaging view of his country’s wildlife that he went so far as to transport large mountain lion skins and moose remains across the ocean to rub in the French naturalist’s  face during his visits to Paris. But the creature that Jefferson had been waiting for, the one that would come to symbolize America’s natural exceptionalism in the country’s early years, was the mastodon.

The mastodon skeleton from the Field Museum’s Evolving Planet. Mastodon tusks are actually extremely modified upper incisor teeth.

In 1801, Jefferson helped painter-turned-naturalist, Charles Wilson Peale, exhume a massive skeleton from the Hudson River Valley in New York. The creature, whose skeleton remains were embellished with extra bones and fake materials by Peale, was eventually the star attraction at his museum in Philadelphia, the nation’s first natural history museum. This turned out to be only the second fossil reconstruction display in history, and it showed --- when first pieced together, the animal’s tusks were erroneously attached upside down.

Jefferson, who claims to have eventually convinced Leclerc to abandon his theory of degenerate species found in the new world, was not content with one mastodon. He would lay out the creature’s massive bones in a room in the White House, taking in its magnificent size. He even believed that the gargantuan creatures still roamed somewhere in the mysterious expanse of land to the west. When he sent Lewis and Clark out to explore the recently acquired land from the Louisiana Purchase in 1804, he desperately hoped they would discover the creatures still roaming in some pristine forest beyond where the map ended.

In Illinois, mastodons overlapped with their slightly larger cousins, the mammoth. When their huge bones became exposed (due to the process of erosion) starting in the 18th century, the two creatures were assumed to be the same until someone compared the teeth. Mammoth teeth are flat with small ridges, perfect for grinding grass and very similar to the teeth of their modern cousin, the elephant. The distantly-related mastodon had large cusps with sharp ridges, teeth so bizarre that some early scientists labeled them as carnivores. Their teeth proved to be perfect for stripping leaves from tree branches snagged with the mastodon’s trunk.

It’s all in the teeth: mastodon teeth (far left) look completely different than the distantly related Asian elephant (middle) and woolly mammoth (right). Despite the animals’ similar appearance, they had much different diets as illustrated by their different teeth.

Because the two giants had different diets and lived in different environments, they were able to coexist in some areas like Illinois. In Illinois there have been around 80 sites where mastodons have been found and close to 60 for mammoths. Many of these otherworldly remains are exposed at construction sites near Chicago as the city continues to expand. An almost complete mastodon jaw, studded with its tell-tale teeth, was uncovered in Bolingbrook during construction of the Interstate 55 highway. Two mammoth tusks were found in a creek in Logan County in 2005. Just this past April, a tusk, part of a jaw (complete with teeth) and massive leg bones from a mastodon were uncovered as workers tried to install a sewer line in Seymour, Indiana. The animal’s spectacular skeleton has graced some of the biggest stages in Illinois’ illustrious history, including Chicago’s Columbian World Fair in 1893, where it took its place of honor alongside the first Ferris wheel and specimens from every corner of the globe.

A nearly complete lower mastodon jaw discovered in Bolingbrook, Illinois at the Field Museum of Natural History.

Both of these titans from the Ice Age disappeared across the country at around the same time, between 11,000 and 10,000 years ago. There has not been one “smoking-gun” factor responsible for their extinction. The most likely explanation is that a variety of factors contributed to their demise, from a warming climate to the arrival of humans from Asia who brought spears and diseases with them. Whatever the cause, mastodons and mammoths, along with the American lion, giant ground sloth, and saber-tooth cats, stood no chance and faded into extinction, leaving only massive bones  behind as proof of their time spent roaming the fertile lands of the Midwest.

In Illinois circa 2019, it takes quite a bit of imagination to picture the venerable creatures of the state’s past. Places like the Field Museum serve as a catalyst to help the young and old alike imagine a more primeval Illinois, one where a massive mastodon lumbered out of the dense thicket surrounding a swamp, grinding a trunk-full of leaves with its cusped teeth while great herds of mammoths trudge along the plains in the distance.

Me holding a cast of the enormous tooth from a mastodon!

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All photos and art by Jack Tamisiea.

Sources:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/mammoths-and-mastodons-all-american-monsters-8898672/

https://www.foxnews.com/story/mastodon-remains-turn-up-in-illinois

https://abc7chicago.com/science/mastodon-bones-unearthed-on-southern-indiana-farm/5263190/

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/9-illinois-critters-that_b_7787342

Moa Memoriam

Remembering New Zealand’s larger-than-life birds, taken from us way too soon.

One of the first thing I came across when visiting New Zealand a few weeks ago were towering sculptures of New Zealand’s two most famous birds, nestled in a small green area between the international and domestic terminals at the Auckland Airport. One was a giant sculpture of a kiwi. Flanking the kiwi sculpture was a bronze moa, too small to do the actual bird justice, which is what they probably would have wanted. Both of the sculptures symbolize the incredible lifeforms that call (or called) New Zealand home, but the moa represents more than just New Zealand. It represents the end of an era when our earth was obsessed with making things bigger during the last few ice ages. It represents the extremes of what is possible for nature. And most poignantly, the demise of the moa represents man’s dominance over nature.

The Auckland Airport’s moa!

So who were the moas? Moas were large flightless birds, ranging from the size of a turkey to the tallest bird ever that would have been eye level with the rim of a basketball hoop. The nine species of moas belong to the order Dinornthiformes, and were originally placed in the ratite group along with the modern giant birds of today like the ostrich and cassowary. But recent studies have found that moas are more closely related to the tinamous birds of South America, which are much smaller and can fly.

Sizing Up Moas: This sketch compares the height of the average human man (5’9” in the US) and the shortest and tallest moas, the little bush moa and the South Island giant moa (which weighed up to 550 pounds), respectively. The South Island giant moa was the tallest species of bird ever, and would have been a dominant basketball player if it had arms or wings.

New Zealand is known for its flightless birds, but moas took that trait to the extreme. They are the only group of birds to completely lose their wing bones. This shrouds their arrival on New Zealand in mystery (they obviously did not fly there without wings) and makes it likely that their ancestors were on the landmass before it split from the rest of Gondwana 85 million years ago or arrived shortly thereafter, and then proceeded to lose their wings.

Without wings, moas used their long legs to get around. The earliest arrivals to New Zealand, the Maori people who arrived around 850 years ago, say that moas were swift and agile runners and would kick to defend themselves. Their temperament seemed to be tamer, however, than modern-day cassowaries who disembowel someone every so often with a swift kick to the stomach. Although intimidating due to their massive size, the moas were peaceful vegetarians, eating grass, leaves and berries from the treetops accessible with their long necks.

South Island giant moas strut their stuff in front of New Zealand’s Southern Alps.

The giant eggs of moas had surprisingly thin shells, some only a millimeter thick. Only around 30 intact moa eggs survive to do this day.

When looking at such a large animal, one cannot help but wonder what kind of sound it made (we all think about T. rex’s roar right?). Thanks to the fossilization of some moa bones from their throats, moas probably sounded something like a giant swan or crane vocalizing through a megaphone, with deep, booming calls that could travel for miles. No one would call moas a James Dean because they effectively lived slow and died old. Unlike many other birds, who mature in a year, moas took around 10 years according to rings in their bones. As you may expect, moa eggs were giant, capable of being almost ten inches long and seven inches wide.

New Zealand proved to be the perfect place for the moa thanks to a lack of mammalian predators and other large herbivores. The only thing the moa had to worry about was death from above thanks to a complimentary large bird of prey, the Haast eagle that had talons the size of tiger claws. Even so, moas thrived on New Zealand for millions of years. Fossils of moas have been found dating back some 2.4 million years and would have lasted another few million years if not for the arrival of man to far flung New Zealand.

The extinction of the moa on New Zealand was caused by the arrival of humans who over-hunted the birds to extinction. According to a 2014 study taking DNA from 281 individual moa specimens, representing four moa species, the bird’s population numbers were stable for the 4,000 years preceding their extinction. The largest species, the South Island giant moa, was even seeing an increase in its population until humans arrived. There were no signs in the moa’s genetic history, like low genetic diversity, that show an animal declining towards extinction. This rapid “disappearance” of the moa, approximately one hundred years after humans arrived is the smoking gun for its extinction.

A man and his moa: Paleontologist Richard Owen, best remembered for coining the term “dinosaur” and helping start the British Natural History Museum, was sent a leg bone fragment from a strange New Zealand animal in 1839. The bone’s light weight perplexed Owen, who suspected it to come from a mammal because of its large size. After four years, Owen concluded that it was in fact from a giant bird and named it Dinornis. After skepticism from much of the scientific community, Owen was ultimately proved right when vast amounts of moa bones were found throughout New Zealand. Today his bust sits beside a moa skeleton cast at Auckland’s War Memorial Museum.

The moa is not the only large animal to be wiped out by humans over the last few thousand years. In fact, it effectively bookends this trend of megafaunal (large animal) extinction that began around 13,000 years ago. Species like mammoths, sabertooth cats, giant marsupials in Australia and ground sloths all disappeared over the last 10,000 years as humans began to spread around the world. In most cases humans were not the only cause. Several ice age species were also dwindling due to climate change as the earth warmed, and human hunting helped wipe out a struggling species. The trend of human impacts on megafaunal extinctions are painfully clear on islands as species began to go extinct from island to island upon the arrival of humans. The extinction of the moa 600 years ago ends this series of megafaunal extinction that saw some of the biggest terrestrial animals since the dinosaurs go extinct.

Moa Skulls: Moas were all part of the Order Dinornithiformes but split into two different families: the Dinornithidae family and the Emeidae family. The moas that Owen named Dinoris are part of the first family and include two species: the North Island giant moa and the South Island giant moa (second from left). The other seven smaller species (including the other three skulls pictured here) are from the Emeidae family and are from both the North and South Islands. This sketch is based off of skulls at the Auckland War Memorial Museum.

But the moa lives on in the imagination of New Zealanders and people from around the world. The giant bird would have been a sight to behold in real life, making the ostrich look mundane by comparison. But perhaps its early demise saved it from some of the indignities faced by its living relatives. If it had survived to see European settlers in New Zealand, it just as likely would have gone extinct from hunting. Many of New Zealand’s other birds are not doing too well today, from the kiwi to the kakapo, thanks to invasive mammals and habitat loss. If the moa had somehow survived two waves of human hunting, how much of its habitat would be left today? In addition to hunting animals, humans also find other ways to exploit large animals for economic gain. With larger eggs and greater size, the moa would have probably replaced the ostrich in zoos and farms.

Mummified moa: This painting is based off of a mummified foot found inside a cave at Mount Owen. The preservation of this foot, which dates back some 3,300 years, is so great that some muscle and sinews are still intact along with the creature’s scaly skin. This foot once belonged to the upland moa, which was the last species to go extinct around 1500. Among the smallest of moas, the upland moa preferred to live in the cold, alpine environments of the South Island.

The moa is gone forever, which is an existential bummer. Moas are often mentioned in the de-extinction debate as a species that could be revived since their extinction fits the date range for relatively intact genetic material. This material has been left behind in large amounts of fossils and mummified remains. But that is a discussion several decades away, if ever. For now we should just take solace in remembering New Zealand’s giant moas, the last true giants to roam New Zealand’s primeval forests.

Never forget the moa! Picture taken at the Auckland War Memorial Museum.

All photographs and art by Jack Tamisiea.

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Sources:

The Auckland War Memorial Museum moa displays

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/03/why-did-new-zealands-moas-go-extinct

http://extinct-animals-facts.com/Extinct-Animals-List/Extinct-Moa-Bird-Facts.shtml

http://nzbirdsonline.org.nz/species/upland-moa