Porch Notes
The Mastodon
History and culture
Long before robins or white pines, Michigan belonged to the giants. The American mastodon — a shaggy, elephant-like Ice Age beast — became the official state fossil in 2002, and it earned the title honestly: its bones keep turning up in Michigan soil.
Mastodons roamed the spruce forests and bogs of the region during and after the last Ice Age, browsing on twigs and branches (their cone-shaped teeth were built for it, unlike the grinding teeth of the related mammoth). When the glaciers retreated and the climate warmed, they died out — but Michigan’s wet, peaty ground preserved them remarkably well. Their remains have been unearthed at more than 250 sites around the state, often by startled farmers draining a field or digging a pond and striking a tusk or a tooth the size of a fist.
Stand in a Michigan farm field, then, and you may be standing over a creature that hasn’t walked there in 10,000 years. That sense of deep time underfoot is exactly why the mastodon makes such a fitting emblem.
Where to see it
The University of Michigan Museum of Natural History in Ann Arbor and the Michigan State University Museum in East Lansing display mastodon remains and skeletons.