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By Glenn L. Jepsen
Edited by GET NJ, COPYRIGHT 2003
Many separate molars and pieces
of tusks of mastodons have been re-covered from the floor of the Atlantic
Ocean off the New Jersey coast, and
the questions raised by these specimens are of great interest and sig-
nificance in geology. How did they
get there? They are frequently found
by scallop fishermen in the dredges
which are dragged along the bottom
of the ocean, and we are indebted to
the owners and operators of the fishing boats and to other interested
friends in the Atlantic City area for
discoveries and reports of these valuable records.
So many teeth of mastodons and
bones of other land-living mammals
have been discovered on the sea
floor that it seems unreasonable to
insist upon transport by water currents or iceberg rafts rather than to
assume that the animals lived where
the bones are found, now reported
to be under as much as several hundred feet of water, and as far as
several hundred miles from the
coast. If the creatures were living
there on dry land the ocean level
must have been much lower than it
is now, perhaps the result of the
vast amount of water that was locked as ice in the great glaciers of
the Ice Age. The submarine fossil
fields may be a favorable place for
future collecting by skin divers.
Most of the teeth found in the
ocean are gray or brown or black
in color, and they show signs of
beginning to become petrified. When
part of one such mastodon tusk was treated with preservatives it unexpectedly turned pink, – the only
pink elephant I ever saw!
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