Student researchers from SUNY Orange, a community college in Orange County, have just pulled more prehistoric animal fossils from the yard of a Scotchtown home. Those fossils reportedly belong to a mastodon! A mastodon is an Ice Age wooly mammouth-type creature that roamed the earth more than 25 million years ago in the Miocene, Pliocene, and Pleistocene epochs!
Mastodon lived and went extinct long before the start of recorded human history (around 11,000 years ago), so the unearthing of bones belonging to the creature is a huge deal.
According to Orange Co. Community College - SUNY Orange's official Facebook page and the New York State Museum, the students' 'ongoing excavation of a mastodon discovered in an Orange County backyard has uncovered a growing collection of skeletal remains'.
(Photo: Orange County Community College - SUNY Orange/Facebook)
Those remains, an estimated 11 ribs, a few vertebrae and foot bones, join two Mastodon teeth found by the homeowner two years ago, according to News 12 Westchester. Eventually, a SUNY Orange dig produced a jawbone, and now these latest relics.
It's so unbelievably cool to know I live in the same neighborhood once roamed by these massive, majestic creatures. I applaud the pain-staking hard work a diligence of the student researchers helping to recreate a world we humans never knew. I can't wait to see what more they find! I wonder if they'll let me come play in the dirt with them and live out my Indiana Jones fantasy, lol.
Hey, a girl can hope. Just never bring a knife to a gun fight, right?
