Mammut Americanum

[Shellseeker]

Sometimes (maybe most times) it is all about luck.

I went out with 3 friends today, kayaking upstream a couple of miles. One thing to note about the Peace now is that it is very shallow. Not much rain for quite a while. What used to be deep pools are now less than 5 feet. Shallow water, sand bars, rock, logs makes kayaking difficult.

I was slow getting to the launch spot, so I was coming up the rear. We were going to a spot that had produced previously.

My kayak kept hitting bottom, so I alternated paddling and walking the kayak. As we got close to the target spot, I was walking and using a probe for gravel in deeper pools. I found some and decided to stop and dig. I found a couple of hemis and little else. My fossil buddies arrived at the targeted spot and yelled for me to catch up. It was only 100 yards to go, and although the water was deep enough , I walked on the left side in 5 inches of water over solid bedrock. Whenever I am in the Peace, I look for fossils. Halfway to my buddies, a pair of cups stared back at me from the crystal clear water.

One of my friends said this is a complete juvenile tooth and that is why it is hollow inside. Is it a juvenile or is a fragment of an adult tooth ? Most Mastodon teeth I see on the net, seem more worn and do not have the vertical groves, but I will listen to experts.

I found a lot of other stuff, but this is my best find in 2 years of seeking fossils. Note that I am keeping it in water for now. I was warned that it might split and crumble if I let it dry out...

Feeling GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD!!!!!

[Auspex]

Oooooooo

[tracer]

it's one loph from a big tooth

as for the lack of wear, just because it was a new tooth doesn't mean it was from a new critter. they had replacement teeth.

[JohnJ]

Anything from one of the tuskers is a nice find; congrats.

[Shellseeker]

Thanks for all responses. It is a great find!! as one of the lophs (new word or me).

I am trying to visualize how much I have in order to determine if it is the front, middle, or back loph.

Tracer,

I know that I am missing the root. Is it normal for a loph to be hollow?

I have not been able to search and find a statement on the net , one way or another on whether the lophs are hollow for all adult fossils.

[Nicholas]

Oooooooo

I believe you mean:

[tracer]

it is a bit hard to see but it looks like it's broken off from the tooth on both sides of the loph, so it may have been one of the middle ones as opposed to having been on the end.

i know that mastodon teeth are found basically in three ways, with the roots, with a filled-base cap, and with a hollow cap with just the enamel. tj actually has both of the types without the roots in his collection, and the cap-only one is so completely perfect inside it and has no wear on the outside, that i kind of think those may be unerupted teeth that never got fully formed and used. but nobody's told me that and i haven't researched it so it could just be another tracerlusion.

if i get a rare burst of initiative later when all the lazy others in the house actually wake up and get up, i might photo the two conditions and upload a pic. i never really know what i'm going to do.

[tracer]

it would seem that my determination in this case has paid off, thusly -

the tooth that's "filled" with dentine has wear on the enamel. the empty cap tooth does not have wear on the enamel. also note that the "filled" tooth has one loph broken off the end. although this is tragic, that tooth was a total day-maker for tj and me and we've been able to find out a lot about the original owner on facebook. his name was "trumpet" and he had lots of friends...

[pond skipper]

Very nice find.

[Shellseeker]

Thanks, Pond Skipper, I AM enjoying it.

Tracer, You are a fountain of knowledge. I have been speculating on exactly what you have deduced... Thanks for you expertise.

.. may be unerupted teeth that never got fully formed and used....

I took a couple of clearer pictures focusing on the peaks and inside the caps. Check out the lack of any wear on the 3rd photo.

So TJ has a couple of these, including hollow cups!!! Did TJ take nay special precautions to keep the fossil from shattering after it dried out?

[tracer]

pretty much all of our pieces of mammoth or mastodon tooth or tusk have been very carefully dried and then treated with either vinac or butvar in acetone.

the stuff varies quite a bit in its initial stability so my concern regarding what we need to do with any given piece varies. i occasionally wick a bit of cyanoacrylate glue into a crack.

one time tj found a fairly large chunk of a mammoth tooth with four plates or so and it was water-logged and highly unstable. because it was so unstable and not one of his more complete finds, i poured some pva-based white glue into a container of water and soaked the piece for several days in that. then when i took it out of that and let it start drying, i just kept wicking white glue into any cracks or crevices until it wouldn't absorb any more. my thought was that the initial soaking in a thinner solution might get the pva molecules deeper into the piece through osmosis (that was my hypothosis) and then the final wicking in of a normal solution of white glue would give it as much strength as possible.

but normally if a piece really matters i try to dry it, and may use a few bucks worth of denatured ethanol and acetone to that end if necessary prior to consolidating it.

[Shellseeker]

Deja Vu all over again.

Peace River, Desoto County, Florida June 28th, 2011 3PM.

Wind gusts, Thunder, Lighting, driving rain... a fossil god smiled.. another Mastodon doublet. Feeling fine. Life is good. :P

Seriously, do Mastodon teeth come from seeds? Just how small do these get? This one is 34mm,

[MikeDOTB]

Wow thats awesome, congrats!

[bmorefossil]

Deja Vu all over again.

Peace River, Desoto County, Florida June 28th, 2011 3PM.

Wind gusts, Thunder, Lighting, driving rain... a fossil god smiled.. another Mastodon doublet. Feeling fine. Life is good. :P

Seriously, do Mastodon teeth come from seeds? Just how small do these get? This one is 34mm,

something about this one is screaming gomph but to me they all looks fairly alike, which ever it is it beats all my land mammal teeth combined.

[Harry Pristis]

This is a mastodont, not a gomphothere tooth.

The earliest teeth are very small. Each tooth starts off as a rigid shell of enamel inside the tooth crypt. First the enamel is laid down. Then the dentin is produced to fill in the shell. Tooth roots are the last part to form. There remains a large pulp cavity even in mature teeth.

The dentin gives the tooth strength and backs up the enamel when later in the mastodont's life the enamel may wear through on the crests of the crown.

If what you have there is only enamel, it almost certainly will not crumble when it dries. Let it dry thoroughly, wire brush only the enamel with your Dremel tool, then consolidate it if you wish.

[Shellseeker]

Harry,

First of all, thanks for the insight and the photos. I know more than I did before reading your comments.

It seems I have individual lophs of unerupted Mastodont teeth. One is a little over 3 inches, the other a little over 1 inch in width. The teeth are enamel only, no dentine, no pulp.

I have some novice level questions:

The earliest teeth are very small.

Are these very small teeth the teeth of newborn or juveniles? OR do these small teeth actually increase in size in the same individual animal? That seems strange, even as I pose the question.

The enamel is pristine with no river wear. Yesterday's tooth was in the top riverbed layer. In the same general area , I have found Megs and Horse teeth that are mostly chipped and heavily eroded by water. Does this lack of wear imply that these teeth have "recently" come out of a matrix that protected them from wear?

[flyguy784]

Beautiful finds. I wish we had Mammoth material here. My only specimens are "purchased", big chunk of tusk and one beautiful tooth. Now I have to go look up yet another word, "lophs". I spend more time looking up words than I do fossiling.

[Harry Pristis]

Harry,

First of all, thanks for the insight and the photos. I know more than I did before reading your comments.

It seems I have individual lophs of unerupted Mastodont teeth. One is a little over 3 inches, the other a little over 1 inch in width. The teeth are enamel only, no dentine, no pulp.

I have some novice level questions:

Are these very small teeth the teeth of newborn or juveniles? OR do these small teeth actually increase in size in the same individual animal? That seems strange, even as I pose the question.

The enamel is pristine with no river wear. Yesterday's tooth was in the top riverbed layer. In the same general area , I have found Megs and Horse teeth that are mostly chipped and heavily eroded by water. Does this lack of wear imply that these teeth have "recently" come out of a matrix that protected them from wear?

The enamel cap does not grow, it fills in from the interior, nurtured by the blood vessels entering the pulp. Think of it this way: The size of the enamel cap is governed by the size of the crypt which is determined by the size of the mastodont.

Most mammals have just two sets of teeth, deciduous and permanent. Elephants have multiple pairs of teeth, each larger pair(s) appearing as the elephant grows in size.

The condition of your tooth implies that it was dashed about by the periodic floods of the Peace River enough to break up the jaw in which this tooth was encrypted. The high-energy environment broke off the shell of the developing root and broke off part of the enamel cap. I'd say your find was well on its way to complete destruction.

This is a complete enamel cap, unerrupted at the death of its producer. They are exquisite things, unblemished by wear, perfect.

[Shellseeker]

Thanks for the photo ,Harry

These teeth are wonderful to behold -- pristine and perfect. I am just fortunate to have rescued a pair of lophs on their way to becoming fragments.

flyguy .. a dated link which will really help me (and maybe you) to remember the word "loph":

MastodontLophs

... The proboscideans that lived in Michigan during the Pleistocene are the American mastodont (Mammut americanum) and mammoth (Mammuthus spp.). The vernacular name for Mammut americanum is "mastodont," which stems from the Greek mast (breast) and odont (tooth) and literally means "breast tooth." This term describes the paired cusps on the occlusal surface of each tooth. These paired cusps are termed lophs or ridge crests and are composed of dentine, covered by enamel. The substance cementum is found between the lophs. Many researchers refer to Mammut americanum as a "mastodon" but the more precise term "mastodont" is preferred and will be used throughout this paper. .

[tracer]

shellseeker, the proper mnemonic device for remembering that word is to picture yourself riding to the grocery store on the back of a mastodon to get a loph of bread...

[Shellseeker]

Thanks Tracer, much better image.