366 IVORY AND THE ELEPHANT
long
memoir by Dr. J. C. Warren of Boston,* and now in the American Museum
of Natural History. Another noted locality is near St. Louis, Missouri,
whence came a fine skeleton now in the British Museum; and in more
recent years numerous skeletons, skulls, and teeth have been
discovered in the draining of swamps and peat bogs in Ohio, Indiana,
Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, and other States. Practically all these
finds are in post-glacial deposits, and the absence of mastodon remains
in the northern New England States and eastern Canada is perhaps
explained on the supposition that these regions were still buried in
glacial ice at the time of the final extinction of the mastodon and
mammoth.
Recently
the fossil deposits of Nebraska have supplied a great wealth of
specimens illustrating the development of mastodon and mammoth in North
America. It is said that this State can boast of nearly two hundred
miles of mastodon beds, extending from Knox County to Sioux County. The
great variety of forms represented is shown by the fact that six
species of mastodons and four species of mammoths are represented. One
exceptionally fine mastodon skeleton was discovered in Cherry County,
and this is perhaps the finest fossil mastodon in the world.f
In
the development of the elephant from its ancestral types, the evolution
of the proboscis has followed the lengthening of the tusks. In the
very earliest forms, such as the Mceritherium for instance, tusks and
proboscis are only beginning to exhibit the characteristics peculiar to
the Proboscidea, but in later forms, when the tusks—in this stage four
in number, two in the upper and two in the lower
*J. C. Warren, 1885, " Description of a Skeleton of the Mastodon Giganteus of North America."
fErwin
H. Barbour, "Prehistoric Elephants in the Morrill Collections, the
Nebraska State Museum and the University of Nebraska," Sunday State Journal, Omaha, January 3, 1915.
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