New York Man Finds Mastodon Jaw In His Lawn

One of the items on my bucket list is to stumble across some kind of fossil. I don’t go out digging in the dirt or brushing sand away from rocks with a toothbrush, and that’s because I want to really stumble across a discovery.

I want to be doing something completely unrelated — like picking up dog poop or lacrossing that dog poop into the neighbor’s yard with a shovel — only to glance over and be like, “Hey, that looks like a fossil.”

It sounds like that’s what happened to a guy in New York who got to cross this item off his bucket list (if it was on there) when he found a mastodon jaw protruding from his lawn.

According to The Guardian, the man — who has not been identified, probably because he doesn’t want people to dig up his yard in search of mastodon remains — lives in Scotchtown, Orange County.

After making the discovery, the man phoned up the experts at the New York State Museum and SUNY Orange to come and have a look-see and retrieved the jaw and even found fragments from a rib and a piece of a toe bone.

While this is the most recent example of someone stumbling across mastodon fossils, it’s not the only time it has happened in the area. New York used to be mastodon country thousands of years ago during the Pleistocene epoch.

In fact, according to The Times Herald-Record, of the last 150 mastodon fossil discoveries, one–third — not to flex some sick math skills on you, but that would be around 50 — have come out of Orange County.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go walk around my apartment complex with my eyes trained on the ground looking for the remains of any mastodons that may have gotten lost and wound up on the Florida peninsula.