More specimens, and a new exhibit

I apologize for the lack of updates. But I promise it's not due to lack of activity, but rather because of an excess. So we have lots of new things to report!

First, back in March I made a brief trip to Seattle to examine specimens from Washington. There were three specimens in the collections there, an isolated upper molar and two nice lower jaws, including this one:

 

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The Washington tooth measurements were a bit surprising. The sample size is small, but in each case these teeth fell into the small area of overlap between California and eastern specimens in terms of the L/W ratios. The lower teeth were actually most similar to a tooth from Arizona, while the upper was close to the California average. It might be that the teeth from states close to California (WA, AZ, ID, UT, maybe NM) are intermediate in proportions between California and the eastern states. But, I have to emphasize that the sample size is tiny - there are more mastodons from Diamond Valley Lake than there are from those five states combined!

I'm also still fleshing out our California record, by visiting other museums in the region. Yesterday Brett and I were at the Los Angeles County Museum, which has several interesting specimens. Below, Brett is taking measurements on the Simi Valley mastodon from Ventura County, while I record the data on an iPad:

 

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This was an interesting specimen. The lower third molar was almost 209 mm long, the longest mastodon tooth from California we've measured so far. But its L/W of 2.33 is right where we'd expect for a California specimen. So even when CA teeth get long, they still stay narrow.

All told, from the LA County collection we added 20 more teeth to the dataset, mostly from California but also including specimens from Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, and Mexico.

I also have a few additional trips scheduled to other southern California museums in the coming weeks. Even as we accumulate this additional data, we've also started putting together the manuscript, which we're hoping to submit later this year.

Finally, the other big news item to report is that this August Western Science Center is hosting a 3-day mastodon workshop. More than a dozen scientists, graduate students, and science writers from all over the US and Canada will come to WSC to present on their research and examine the WSC mastodon collections. At the end of the workshop we're opening a new exhibit, "Valley of the Mastodons", that will feature nearly all of the WSC mastodon specimens. We believe this will be the largest public display of mastodon specimens in history, and the Mastodons of Unusual Size preliminary results will be a major component of the exhibit. I'll post more on this in the coming weeks.