25 years ago: Mastodon unearthed in Hyde Park

Sep 30

Written By HVNY

25 years ago, history dating back more than 13,000 years was finally exhumed after a mysterious discovery in a backyard in Dutchess County.

In the late summer of 1999, Larry and Sheryl Lozier hired a contractor to deepen a pond on their property in Hyde Park. When the family returned home, they walked around the freshly-dug pond and found a very large bone – a three-foot-long, 12-inch diameter humerus to be exact – propped up against a pine tree in the back of the property. After showing the giant brown bone to a neighbor who was familiar with horses, the homeowner was told, “Larry, that’s no Clydesdale.”

The discovery received a lot of attention and media coverage; the Lozier’s daughter even brought the bone in for a show-and-tell with schoolmates at Hyde Park Elementary School. Hundreds of volunteers assisted with the excavation, including the 10-year-old son of a cameraman filming a Discovery Channel documentary even helped find a leg bone on the bank of the pond. Subsequent excavations of the backfill around the pond “uncovered an ulna that matched the humerus, as well as a piece of tusk.”

Dr. Bob Schmidt of Simon’s Rock College, confirmed at the time that the two long bones were a humerus and an ulna – left foreleg – likely from a proboscidean, part of the elephant family. The mystery continued until August of 2000 when members from Cornell University and The Paleontological Research teams used a ground-penetrating radar to locate a bone bed in the bottom of the pond. The bone bed “contained a near-complete skeleton, including an 8-foot-long tusk and a pelvis the size of a dining room table.”

The paleontologists concluded that the assemblage could belong to either a mammoth, likely a woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), or an American mastodon (Mammut americanum). It wasn’t until the skull was recovered from another backfill pile that researchers were able to confirm the species as a mastodont.

After examining the teeth and bones, researchers concluded that, “in life, the mastodont stood ten-feet-high at the withers and weighed ten-thousand pounds.” A radiocarbon analysis of a tusk dated the Hyde Park mastodon to 11,480 years old. It is suspected that the Lozier’s backyard was once a swamp when the 30-year-old male mastodon died.

On September 30, 2000, the Hyde Park mastodon excavation site was closed. Researchers tossed a “shiny new 2000 Lincoln penny into the excavation as a message to future scientists.”

The Hyde Park mastodon’s skeleton was transferred to the Paleontological Research Institution’s Museum of the Earth in Ithaca, where it is currently on display.