124 W. Main, P.O. Box 550, Crosbyton, TX
79322
(806) 675-7777 (806) 675-2421 (Fax)
The Wapple Bope Mastodon in a Bean Field
UPDATE (5-24-2005)
His teeth are jet-black. His tusks, a
rich chocolate brown and bears or wolves had made a meal of him. And
buried under his soft woody bones were seeds of plants, alive at his
death.
On April 25, 2005, Jordan Hall and I
left for our Mastodon dig in Indiana. Jordan is the young man who
actually found the Allosaur skull featured in Doug Phillip’s film
Raising The Allosaur. En route, we dropped in to see one of our mammoth
skulls being installed at Dr. Tom Sharp’s new museum in Arkansas. After
setting up our Triceratops at the new Answers in Genesis Creation
Museum in Kentucky for Ken Ham, we made our way on up to Winnamack
Indiana to finish the big mastodon dig there.
Our site was in the middle of a
soybean field, where mint for chewing gum is also grown. This area
between Winnamack, Knox, and Bass Lake, Indiana was a vast swamp when
the mastodons and mammoths lived here. The royalty of Europe came here
to hunt fowl before the area was drained and the swamps dried up. The
water drained off into rivers, through deep ditches, revealing some of
the finest farmland in America. And by the 1910s farmers began turning
the jet-black soil into furrows for crops.
The ditch diggers with big dredges on
boats, were the first ones to encounter the strange huge black bones of
long dead elephants we know now as mastodons, Mammuthus americanum. How
did they get buried in the muck of these old marshes? Many theories
have been advanced. The ICE AGE story was the most popular. Did vast
glaciers slide down over these swamps? Maybe they created them.
The first farmers were the next ones
to encounter mastodon bones. The wide blades of their mole board plows
began hitting the bones and tusks of these gigantic and amazing
creatures. But what were these tropical animals doing here? And then in
stark contrast, the same plow points were thrown out of the ground when
they hit granite boulders, which were carried from hundreds of miles
north. Many of them had flattened places. “What’s the deal here,” many
asked? Tropical elephants mixed with ice-borne boulders?
We found two of these boulders in
with our mastodon. During the first dig here in 2004, I was puzzled to
find small pea-sized bits of white quartzite rock in with the black
peat. Then someone hit a basketball-sized boulder near the rib cage.
This year we dug that out and another one a few feet away like it. Sure
enough, there appeared to be slide marks where the ice ground the rocks
against other rocks.
At the lowest level, about 24 inches
deep, Jordan began finding seeds. Some were the size of a peanut.
Others were like grass seed, probably swamp grass. He and a local
fellow, Dave then found a tree limb about an inch and a half thick. We
hope to have these examined by experts.
Excitement really began to mount when
they exposed a hard glassy black object that I immediately recognized
as a mastodon tooth. It was a shed tooth. While he lived, the roots of
the tooth were being dissolved by the new tooth coming in under it. And
had the big bull lived, this tooth would soon have been shed and fallen
out. There is much more.