Among the worst enemies of the Ice Age's giant mastodons was a charging frenzied monster with curved tusks backed by six tons of angry flesh and bone — in other words, other mastodons, according to new evidence. Three-dimensional modeling of fossil mastodon skulls, tusks and bone injuries make a compelling case for the possibility that the male, or bull elephant-like animals of the ice age often fought dramatic battles to the death over mating rights. "There's a pattern of damage that's observed on several different skulls," said mastodon expert Dan Fisher of the University of Michigan. Crushed bone found under and behind one eye would have required puncturing a tough skin and 20 inches of jaw muscles. "It's not a place that'd be easy to get to just thumping around," he said. The 3-D modeling of the injuries has also revealed at least one injury that conforms to the shape of a tusk tip. "The short of it is that there was tusk impact on bone." And there was death. Fisher presented his discovery this week at the meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in St. Paul, Minn.

The telltale injuries also support the idea that bull mastodons probably went into a crazed mating state of mind, called musth, in the same way as do modern bull elephants, hippos and elk in rutting season. While in musth bulls do not eat and are extremely violent towards other males — to the point of deadly jousting. More evidence that bull mastodons were in musth when they died is the tree-ring-like growth records in their tusks. The tusks indicate that the bulls were probably fasting at the time of death, Fisher said.

View: Full Article | Source: Discovery Channel

Hello Lionel,
We found a giant tooth embedded in some gravelly soil under a few inches of water in Catoma Creek in Montgomery, Alabama. I took it to A.U.M. (Auburn Univ. at Montgomery) and asked an Archeologist about it. He took one look at it and told me it was a mastadon tooth, a molar, and to be exact an upper rear molar, showing me pics of the teeth in a skull. He said it could be as old as 9000 years old. My son pried and beat it till it came loose and pulled it straight up, its root embedded in the soil as if he was "pulling a tooth". This made me wonder if the skull is still under there laying upside down in the sedement?? There have been a lot of Mastodon fossils and bones found in the Montgomery area.
Anyway, I wonder how much something like that wold be worth, if anything? How could I check or find out what it would be worth.
Take care,
Dave/"Am Boghadair"