(Radio Iowa) – The Office of the State Archaeologist has spent 12 days unearthing a mastodon skull in south-central Iowa’s Wayne County. State Archeologist John Doershuk says it all started when he got a call about a Facebook post. “It was a photo of this relatively young guy. Huge grin on his face, holding a Fred Flintstone-type, you know, 45-inch long, massive bone,” he says. That was the leg bone of a mastodon that led to the unearthing of the skull.

Doershuk would normally leave such things to paleontologists, but a sample came back approximating its age at 13-thousand-600 years old. That’s on the edge of when native American ancestors would have come into this area of Iowa. ” The last glaciation probably still had the northern part of Iowa under ice. But the southern part was ice free at the time and was starting to vegetate and animals like mastodons were coming in to browse and human hunters would have also found that a hospitable place as well,” Doershuk says.

This mastadon skull and other bones were recovered in Wayne County. (photo from State Archaeologist’s FB page)

So far no mastodon bone in Iowa bears cut marks consistent with human involvement, but Doershuk says he’s looking for that in this fossil. Doershuk says he was particularly excited about a two foot section of tusk recovered from the site. He called it a “goldmine” for answering all sorts of questions about the animal.  “Apparently there are techniques now to determine how many calves a female mastodon had that get recorded as a chemical signature because of the changes in the body chemistry during the pregnancy and the birth. And that gets recorded in the tusks,” Doershuk explains.

The team didn’t find any stone tools near the bones that might indicate there was some human interaction.