I first heard about mastodons in our area when reading a small volume entitled The Recollections of Edwin Bassett Jones.
Imagine looking out of your living room window and seeing a creature over three metres high and 4.5 metres long, looking somewhat like a hairy elephant, casually munching on the tree out front.
A bit bizarre, right? Well . . . if you lived in our area around 10,000 years ago, such a sight would not have been uncommon.
I first heard about mastodons in our area when reading a small volume entitled The Recollections of Edwin Bassett Jones. This former Chatham city engineer, inventor, amateur archeologist and local historian from the late 1880s was an amazing man, “in on” anything of intellectual interest going on in Chatham or Kent County.
One thing he got wind of in 1880 was the unearthing of an “enormous tooth and part of a jaw bone” on John Ridley’s farm not far from the hamlet of Troy (near Lake Erie in the Rondeau area).
Jones made quick tracks out to Troy to begin investigating. With steel rods, he probed the earth for about nine metres around where the original artifacts were found. When these rods hit an obstacle, he would dig down and uncover what they had come across.
Jones and his friends unearthed 13 immense ribs and seven pieces of vertebra within a roughly 3.3-metre circle. The ribs were heaped in such a way that getting them out intact was difficult. One they did recover was almost 1.2 m long
Most bones were found nearly a metre below the surface on a bed of gravel and greyish-white marl (boggy soil), interspersed with fresh-water shells. Jones postulated the spot was once the beach of an ancient lake, resting on a glacial drift.
After collecting as many as he could, Jones got permission to display the bones in the front window of Chatham druggist (and fellow “explorer”) R.C. Burt for a week.
The display was quite impressive. An old photo shows a large banner saying The Chatham Scientific & Literary Society’s Exhibit over a relatively accurate drawing of an ancient mastodon, and smaller type hailing The Remains of a Kent County Giant, with Troy mastodon bones arrayed in the foreground are various remains of the Troy mastodon uncovered in 1880.
Jones’s first encounter with relics of an ancient time would not be his last.
In March 1884, a farmer on Chatham Township’s ninth concession, uncovered some strange-looking bones and sent word to the locally famous “mastodon hunter.”
Within a few days, Jones had recovered a complete mastodon tusk (some 2.4 metres long), a humerus and a foreleg bone that was nearly a metre long and 68 centimetres around at the knee joint. They also found a pelvis, tibia and atlas (first joint of the vertebrae).
Examining the bones, Jones concluded that while there were obvious comparisons between mastodon and elephant, there were also major differences.
Mastodon bones, according to Jones, were “much more massive than any elephant, indicating a correspondingly superior muscular development” and “the feet or paws of the mastodon were more elongated,” while the teeth were larger and “nipple-shaped”.
Jones took part in or knew about other Kent County “digs” in the 1880s, including at the gravel pit in Thamesville, the Scane farm at Ridgetown, the Shepley Farm near Chatham, the Courtenay farm near Camden, and others near Euphemia and in Essex County.
But the greatest mastodon bone find of them all came in spring 1890 while William Reycraft was digging a ditch on his uncle’s HIghgate-area farm.
Next week. we’ll examine this important find, the skulduggery surrounding the biones’ disappearance and how they ended up hundreds of kilometres away from Chatham-Kent. It is a mystery that still confounds many today.
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Gilberts: Local mastodon bones discovered in late 1880s
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12.04.2024
I first heard about mastodons in our area when reading a small volume entitled The Recollections of Edwin Bassett Jones.
Imagine looking out of your living room window and seeing a creature over three metres high and 4.5 metres long, looking somewhat like a hairy elephant, casually munching on the tree out front.
A bit bizarre, right? Well . . . if you lived in our area around 10,000 years ago, such a sight would not have been uncommon.
I first heard about mastodons in our area when reading a small volume entitled The Recollections of Edwin Bassett Jones. This former Chatham city engineer, inventor, amateur archeologist and local historian from the late 1880s was an amazing man, “in on” anything of intellectual interest going on in Chatham or Kent County.
One thing he got wind of in 1880 was the unearthing of an “enormous tooth and part of a jaw bone” on John Ridley’s farm not far from the hamlet of Troy (near Lake Erie in the Rondeau area).
Jones made quick tracks out to Troy to begin investigating. With steel rods, he probed the earth for about nine metres around where the original artifacts were found. When these rods hit an........
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