WAVP meeting, and some new teeth

 

Last Saturday I attended the annual Western Association of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Prescott, AZ, where I presented an update on the Mastodons of Unusual Size project. The talk was well received, with lots of good questions and discussion afterward.

There was some new and interesting data in the talk. Three days before the meeting, I received some measurements on a small number of mastodon teeth from Alaska and the Yukon, sent to me by Grant Zazula at the Beringia Center. Grant published a paper back in 2014 that showed that mastodons were only present in Alaska and the Yukon during warm interglacial periods, and that they left when the glaciers started expanding. I had a hypothesis that perhaps the Yukon population had simply moved south into California when it started getting really cold around 50,000 - 60,000 years ago. If this was the case, then the Yukon and Alaska specimens might show the same unusual tooth proportions as the California ones.

Turns out I was wrong. While the teeth from Alaska and the Yukon are quite small (like CA), in terms of their length:width ratio they look just like teeth from the rest of the country, with lower ratios than the CA specimens. This doesn't mean that the CA mastodons aren't descended from the Yukon ones; it just means that we don't have any evidence to support it.

It also makes it more important to get data on the rare mastodons from Washington and Oregon. I'm working on ways to gather that information now.

Thanks to Grant for providing the Yukon and Alaska data!