Benedict was excavating a pond earlier this spring on the 18B Road land, east of the village of Maxinkuckee, when excavator Gary Mc-Ghee, of Argos, signaled Benedict to show him what Benedict describes as “the big shoulder bone probably three feet long and 12 to 14 inches around at the ends. Then we stopped digging right away; we both had enough sense to find out what we had. I called Bill Snyder from Plymouth . . .  he had been involved with a dig near West Elementary. He put me in touch with Ron Richards from the (Indiana) state museum.”
After Richards and another museum representative explained Benedict’s options – dig and sell, donate locally, or donate the bones to the state museum – Benedict discussed the matter with his brother and signed papers donating the artifacts to the state. “Not everything has to be for sale,” says Benedict. “People say, ‘You can get this and that for the bones.’ I like the idea of the bones being in a museum.”
Richards, chief curator of natural history at the Indianapolis-based museum for the past 27 years, identified the bones as that of a female mastodon, probably about middle aged. (Benedict says he and his brother decided to nickname the mastodon ‘Opal’ in honor of their mother). Richards adds that it appears a second set of bones is also present, probably of a juvenile mastodon, though it’s possible the two creatures were separated by thousands of years.
Mastodons in this area would have become extinct around 10,000-12,000 years ago. The museum plans to carbon date some of the bones to determine a precise age. The dig, Benedict says, is about 10 percent of the work. Much more will take place under a microscope in coming months to analyze details about the soil, air and bones themselves.
The dig began July 7 and is slated to wrap up by July 19 at the latest, says Richards, who says the state museum typically goes on such digs once or twice a year, with a mastodon skeleton turning up somewhere in the state about once every other year. He says the Benedict bones are “icing on the cake” for the museum.
“We have an exhibit coming in the next few years (at the museum) of Indiana elephant graveyards,” Richards explains, “and we didn’t have enough material. Then up pops the Benedict mastodon. We’ve gotten some great mastodons over the years, but this is a female, fully adult. We want collections that show the full range. And the thing that’s really shown up is a lot of small bones, and that’s often not found. We have (here) a lot of foot, throat, and tips of toes that are rare in collections. We’ve have a ‘super screen’ to put a lot of the dirt pile through.”
Other than initial equipment damage to the animal’s skull, which is in multiple pieces, Richards says the skeleton was well preserved. “There are great teeth, limb bones, ribs; they’re displayable things, in good shape.”
He adds that this part of Indiana would have been a conifer forest during the mastodon’s life, as seen in northern regions today.
“Most people can visualize a mastodon, which they’ve seen in pictures,” notes Benedict, referring to the ice age when such creatures roamed Indiana. “But people have trouble visualizing hundreds of feet of ice right here.”
Richards says it’s difficult to ascertain the animals’ cause of death. “Some are found in former lakes and ponds after the ice retreated. Some became mired in mud, or died in a seasonal drought, or fell through the ice. We almost never know. The end of the glacial period was about 10,000 years ago, so they survived glaciations, which had already left Indiana. Then there were massive die-offs. Some think it was due to a rapid change in climate, or to humans arriving, or disease, or a meteorite. I tend to lean towards the idea of rapidly changing climate, myself.”
Richards says the state museum has conducted numerous digs around the Rochester and Plymouth area, and that digs associated with Bill Snyder of Plymouth “tend to be good digs. He gets us a lot of help in this part of Indiana. And the landowners are gracious, great hosts. I think (Snyder) learns a lot each time. It’s just a real good situation for everybody.”
The dig, says Benedict, continues from morning until night, even in the rain. And it’s obvious that the find resonates with Benedict, whose family has been working this land – and recording its changes – back to the days when draining land that was once wooded for farming was done with mules and manual equipment.
“You think about farming corn and beans around here for the past 100 years,” he muses, with a contemplative smile, “and then you realize something like this was walking around right here 10,000 years ago. This (last 100 years) is a very insignificant piece of time.”