There's More to New Jersey than the Sopranos

2. When Prehistoric Elephants Roamed New Jersey

When Prehistoric Elephants Roamed 15 2 When Prehistoric Elephants Roamed New Jersey On a winter day in 1954, a workman dredging a pond in Sussex County came upon the enormous, grinning skull of some monstrous animal. The owner of the pond, Gus Ohberg, called the police, who called the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton. After weeks of digging , scientists and volunteers unearthed the skeleton of a mastodon from the muck at the bottom of the pond. That skeleton now stands in the State Museum. There have been more than a dozen other mastodon skeletons dug up in New Jersey over the years, plus countless teeth, tusks, and bone fragments . Jersey mastodons are on display in the Rutgers Geology Museum, the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, the Bergen County Museum, and the Sussex County Historical Society. Jersey fossil hunters have also uncovered some tooth fragments from mammoths, another species of prehistoric elephant. Mastodons and mammoths , incidentally, often get mixed up in the public mind. (It doesn’t help that, for some perverse reason, the scientific name for mastodon is “mammut.”) Basically, mammoths were bigger and hairier than mastodons , but the distinction would probably be of little concern if you bumped into one in prehistoric New Jersey. Mastodons and mammoths came to North America about twenty- five million years ago across the land bridge between Alaska and Siberia. They seem to have been particularly fond of the chilly, Ice Age forests of eastern North America, including New Jersey, where they grazed on twigs, branches, pine cones, and grass. Scientists estimate that mastodons and mammoths became extinct somewhere between five thousand and ten thousand years ago. This is practically yesterday as these things are measured. It used to be thought (by Thomas Jefferson, among other people) that these creatures might still be found alive somewhere in remote areas of Asia or North America. 16 There’s More to New Jersey . . . This romantic idea turned out to be false, but several carcasses of mammoths have been found frozen in Siberian ice, so fresh that once defrosted their flesh has been eagerly devoured by sled dogs. Why did mastodons and mammoths die out? There have been many theories. Perhaps it was a change in climate, or the development of a genetic defect, or the spread of a fatal epidemic. It might also have been the work of some fierce and unrelenting predator who hunted down and killed every last one without concern for the environment or conservation . Guess who. Yes, the age of the mastodon and the mammoth overlapped ours, and the creatures were here when humans first arrived in North America from Asia. Hungry, carnivorous humans, armed with spears, clubs, and nerve, were surely able to overcome those lumbering vegetarians. Using fire, Mastodon Skeleton The fossilized remains of a New Jersey mastodon are exhibited in the Rutgers Geology Museum. Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries. When Prehistoric Elephants Roamed 17 hunters may have driven the beasts over cliffs; or perhaps they singled out infants for slaughter. The idea that humans lived at the same time as mastodons and mammoths is intriguing. It helps to make up for the disappointing fact that, contrary to the old Hollywood B-movie images of sexy babes in fur bikinis battling tyrannosaurs, the last dinosaur became extinct millions of years before the first Homo sapiens. The connection between humans and prehistoric elephants thousands of years ago brings us to the subject of two controversial artifacts found just across the New Jersey border in Delaware and Pennsylvania. In the late nineteenth century a collector purchased a hoard of Indian relics said to have been unearthed from a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. One of the objects was a broken piece of flat stone; it had evidently been used as a neck ornament. What made it remarkable was that engraved on one side was what appeared to be a mammoth smashing through an Indian village. The artifact was defended as genuine by a wealthy amateur naturalist , Henry Chapman Mercer. In 1885 Mercer published “The Lenape Stone; or the Indian and the Mammoth” to argue his case. But it is the consensus of opinion among experts that the Lenape Stone is a fake. The ornament is of a type that dates from about 1,000 b.c., long after the mammoths died out. The stone is in two pieces, and lines that start on one piece...