The Postman's Mastodon

Every so often, without swinging a pick or lifting a shovel, professional diggers discover scientific treasures. Browsing through the modest collections of amateur "rock hounds," they have found many a rare fossil, often misclassified and almost as obscure as if it were still buried in prehistoric shale. Last winter, hoping for just such a find, veteran Paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson took time out from a lecture tour to visit the private museum of Alonzo Wesley Hancock, a retired Oregon postman.

An amateur archaeologist ever since he was a boy in the Ozarks, 69-year-old Digger Hancock showed his visitor an array of calcified nuts, leaves and bone fragments. Paleontologist Simpson was fascinated by a giant (450 lbs.), two-tusked hunk of elephant skull which the ex-mailman had dug up twelve years before. Hancock thought he had found the remains of a Tetrabelodon, an early elephant that had roamed the Northwest during the Pliocene period, some 5,000,000 years earlier. Cautiously, Expert Simpson disagreed. To him, the jawbone looked as if it belonged to a Miocene mastodon, the elephant cousin that migrated to America from Asia during the golden age of mammals, some 12 million years ago.

In those days eastern Oregon was an area of large lakes surrounded by lush, subtropical forests. Hancock's ancient proboscidian had probably lumbered into , a prehistoric mire, got stuck there and died on his feet, his head reaching up to the level where the jawbone was uncovered ages later.

Mastodons ranged all over America as late as 5,000 years ago, but paleontologists have found only small traces of their remote ancestors--a few teeth, part of a tusk, and small fragments of jawbone. From these scanty remains, the scientists deduced that the beast stood some 7-ft. tall at the withers, was a little smaller than later mastodons and a little bulkier than modern elephants. Now, if Dr. Simpson was correct, they would be able to reconstruct the whole Miomastodon head.

Home in Manhattan, where he is curator of fossil mammals at the American Museum of Natural History, Dr. Simpson studied photographs of Hancock's find. Last week he announced that his hunch was correct. The huge jawbone surely belonged to a Miomastodon. Next summer Hancock hopes to go back to the barren sagebrush country of eastern Oregon and have another look at his diggings. If his luck holds, the bone detectives may be able to rebuild the beast's entire body.

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