I enjoy it when the “olds makes the news”, by which I mean fresh information emerging about the Great Long Ago. Recently there have been news reports of the bones of bygone beasts being unearthed – mastodons in Illinois (which is no longer a surprise in the American midwest, but there’ve been a string of discoveries there lately) and a massive crocodile in central Argentina, dubbed “Godzilla” just because it looks so goddamned vicious (to quote Lou Reed).

As a password-carrying member of the Google Earth Community, of course, I’m required by law to track down the exact places where these palaeontologists are disturbing the soil, make an inspection and then duly report my findings to the Rest of the Gang. This is done my adding another “placemark” icon to the mounting burden of nosiness already threatening to slow the planet’s spin.

The process is fraught with peril, as anyone who’s placemarked a place that’s already placemark learns. There are official moderators at Google Earth, doing their best to monitor the contributions – nearly 4,000 new members joined last Saturday alone, swelling the ranks to almost 330,000 – and then there are the self-appointed adjudicators who rail endlessly (and in vain) against the duplication, like the guy in China who loves to lambaste fellow Earth Oglers with the snipe, “You didn’t turn on your layers, did you?” by which he means they didn’t check first to see whether the location they’ve placemarked already had a pin stuck to it, which is done by activating the Google Earth layer on your browser, which reveals all the existing placemarks.

His frustration is understandable: There are literally dozens of placemarks clinging to the Eiffel Tower, accumulating as one person after another joins the GE Community and begins exploring the world’s satellite images, and can’t help but celebrate at locating Eiffel’s spire by letting the Rest of the Gang know where it is. The newcomer has indeed not activated his layers and thus not seen that dozens have people have been to the tower’s summit before him. See thepic from Google Earth. The tower’s in there somewhere.

The same is true of New York’s skyscrapers, the similarly massive Jinmao Tower in Shanghai and, even closer to home for me, Bangkok’s popular Chatuchak Weekend Market (although the ambiguities of transliteration have it posted with Jatujak, JJ and other alternative spellings, and some radio geek has quite unhelpfully pierced it with no fewer than four pins to show where at the shopping complex he picked up different broadcast frequencies while en route to the base camp at Mount Everest!).

Anyway, no one had bothered with the mastodon finds in Illinois, so I poked a pin in a couple of places there (see my post here), but someone had been to “my” dinosaur site in South America, although disconcertingly a location to the south of where I was heading.

I put the Internet on the job to determine that I wasn’t off the mark (no pun intended) and, pleased nonetheless that a co-browser with a Spanish-sounding name had plotted the locale of a fascinating dig in what was likely his home country, added my relatively meek crocodile to his Carolinii Gigantosaur. Hopefully no one’s miffed, and I found a pic of the site that matches the satellite image exactly. The Argentina post is here.

My mastodon hunt began with an Associated Press story which in turn came from the journal Science. The remains of mastodons and mammoths, it said, “keep turning up” in Illinois. The American mastodon (Mammut americanum), which roamed the midwest between 40,000 and 11,000 years ago, stood between 2.5 and three metres tall at the shoulder. A mounted skeleton of one is on display at the Illinois State Museum in Springfield, but it’s actually a composite of several skeletons found at Boney Springs in central Missouri in the late 1960s and early ’70s.

Mastodon Lake in the city of Aurora’s Phillips Park (originally Townsend Lake) is so called because of the discovery of multiple mastodon bones in marl below peat and muck during its excavation in 1933. A 10-foot tusk was unearthed nearby in 1859. Many of the bones are on display in the visitors’ centre here. Waubonsee Community College, the Illinois State Museum, and the Illinois State Geological Survey are still excavating here, and volunteers are welcome. The picture below shows the kids’ playground at Mastodon Lake. I don’t suppose those are real tusks, do you?

Associated Press
A few months after the last of the elephants left Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo in May, amid complaints from activists that Illinois doesn’t have a climate fit for such animals, remains of their ancient relatives were showing up around the state.

“It almost seemed that mastodons and mammoths were falling out of the trees for a few weeks,” said paleontologist Jeffrey Saunders, the curator of geology at the Illinois State Museum in Springfield. He’s frequently the expert called in to verify and identify the teeth, bones and tusks of the giant Ice Age mammals when they are found in the state.

Saunders was a very busy man in September.
One of his trips was to a site on Sugar Creek in Logan County, where a Lincoln College freshman found two mammoth tusks while studying river mussels. He also went to Pratts Wayne Woods Forest Preserve in DuPage County, where a contractor found mastodon teeth while working on a wetlands restoration project. Saunders’ subsequent digging there turned up a rib and tusk fragments.

And on the same day the teeth were found, a man developing a golf course in Kendall County called Saunders to say one of his workers had found a mastodon tooth there, and he wanted to know how much to pay him for it.

He said the recent spate of findings may be due to this summer’s drought, which shrank the wetlands where mastodon remains are usually found. It also may reflect the spread of construction projects into Chicago’s outer suburbs.

“But whatever the reason, there’s no doubting that we have a rich record of large Pleistocene fauna here in Illinois,” Saunders said, referring to the giant mammals of the last Ice Age. “There are about 80 localities of record here for American mastodons, and about 60 for mammoths. And I’d suspect that probably only one out of every 10 finds is reported. I’d love to know how many remains are being used as doorstops or are sitting in private curiosity cabinets.”

Both mastodons and mammoths were prevalent in Illinois until 10,000 to 11,000 years ago, and although both resembled modern elephants, they were not closely related to each other. “You can think of elephants and mammoths as first cousins, but mastodons were only distant relatives,” Saunders said. “Mammoths were hairier than modern elephants, and had longer tusks … Mastodons were huge, but low-slung, and their teeth were a completely different shape.

Saunders said that in Illinois, mammoths typically seemed to have roamed glacial plains about 60 miles to the north of the swamps where the mastodons were living. He said both beasts died out – along with more than 30 other types of large mammals – during North America’s Great Extinction about 10,000 years ago, for which there are several hypotheses.

One is sudden environmental change, another is overhunting by early humans and a third is that the animals were killed by diseases probably brought from Asia by the early humans, he said.

Meanwhile, down Patagonia way, more news from the busily prolific palaeontologists working outside the city of Neuquén on Lake Barreales, where visitors are also apparently welcome to pitch in at the dig site.

A new species of the genus Araripesuchus dubbed “Godzilla” – a sea creature that appears to be “part crocodile, part T Rex and 100-per-cent terrifying”, was discovered here, according to news reports in November 2005. The 13-foot-long Dakosaurus andiniensis had an 18-inch-long jaw with interlocking four-inch teeth. It’s a long-lost relative of the crocodile, yet it had fins. There were many types of crocodiles around 135 million years ago, when Dakosaurus roamed the sea, but none so big.

The area around Neuquén has proven to be rich in strange new fossils. It’s where the Limay and Neuquén rivers meet to form the Negro River, and the cliffs on their banks have been thoroughly developed in recent decades to produce oil and hydroelectricity.