GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Fossil lovers get ready, there's a mammoth of a fossil coming soon to the Grand Rapids Public Museum (GRPM). Well, maybe not a mammoth, but a close relative — a mastodon.
Mastodons went extinct about 12,000 years ago, towards the end of the last ice age. Their fossils have only been found in North America, the one that will be on display at GRPM was found right in Kent County, just north of Kent City along 22 Mile Road.
Mastodons were a sort of hairier Asian elephant. However, researchers are unsure of exactly how much hair they had. With mammoths, researchers have been able to discover and study many of their fossils. Mastodons though, have been in short supply.
Mastodons were a bit shorter and longer than their mammoth relatives, coming in at 8-11 feet wide at the shoulders and 8,000-14,000 lbs. in weight.
13 ON YOUR SIDE went into GRPM's Community Archives Research Center to get a first look at the skeleton that's expected to be put on display in 2025 and the process it's been going through to get it ready.
GRPM Science Curator Corey Redman showed us the Clapp Family Mastodon, which he said was found in August of 2022.
"Over the last two years, most of that time, the bones have been drying," Redman said. "It takes a very long time to dry the bones because they're waterlogged, and we want to dry them very, very slowly so they don't deform or get any damage."
Redman said now that the bones have been dried out, they've been working to piece the mastodon back together.
"We have Research Casting International from Ontario, Canada here," said Redman. "What they are doing is they are scanning. They're doing a high-resolution scanning of each individual bone. And then they, from that, they'll do a 3D print of each bone and put together a standing, articulated skeleton of the Clapp Family Mastodon, which we will display as part of a new exhibit in fall of 2025."
Redman said that most fossils that we see on display are exact casts or replicas of the fossil because it helps with the long-term conservation of the fossils. By keeping the originals safely stored, they're protected from light, dust, oils and just overall damage from sitting on mounts.
Also, this way they don't have to drill holes into the original fossils in order to get them into the mount.
"It allows the general public to still enjoy the, you know, the discovery and its full glory, but the scientists can still access the original bone and study it for any kind of research that they want to do," said Redman.
While the mastodon fossil has been drying out for two years, Redman said it doesn't seem like it's been that long. He said he can still remember the excitement of that discovery in 2022.
"It's not every day you find a partial American mastodon," he said. "And you know, the Clapp Family Mastodon is very complete. It's over 80% complete, which is extremely rare, especially for an animal that size."
While Redman said the process of digging up the Clapp Family Mastodon was exciting, and while you might expect it to take a long time, it actually had to be done quite quickly.
"You're at an active construction site, so you want to try to remove the bones as quickly and safely as possible, to conserve as much scientific information as you can," he said. "But you know, you also need to get out of their way so they can continue their project."
Digging up the fossil took their team just one long day, Redman said the construction crew and everyone was great to work with as they interrupted their project to recover and preserve the incredible discovery.
"It was a lot of fun, a lot of excitement and a lot of energy, a lot of crazy at the same time," said Redman. "The mastodon is in really good shape. It was very nicely preserved. But there's always some kind of pieces, you know, there's always some pieces and parts to put back together, like a puzzle."
While the process of digging the fossil up took just one day, getting it ready for display has been much longer. Redman said the bones were kept in bags that had a small opening in them.
"Early on, when the bones were really wet, we'd come in every couple days and we'd have to rotate the bones," he said.
Redman said that the process used gravity to drain the water out of the bones. When they rotated them, they also had to dump water out of the bags that had held them. Then, they would seal the bones back up in the bag and repeat. Over time, the bones dried out more and more and needed to be rotated less and less.
"They basically have spent most of the last two years in these bags," he said. "What you're going for is, you want the bone to dry as uniformly as possible on all sides, both inside and outside, so you don't get cracking, you don't get delamination, stuff like that."
The last few months, Redman said, is the first time the bones have been out in the open since the process to dry them out began.
Now, Redman said the team doing the scanning makes it look easy. However, it's a very involved process.
"A lot of it is, you know, having a high-precision instrument that you kind of wave over all of the surfaces, and then the computer renders a, basically a reconstruction of it," he said. "A lot of the time is post-processing, kind of cleaning it up, filling in any gaps that the scanner didn't quite pick up, or, you know, kind of just filling it out a little bit."
The process of scanning all the bones, filling in the gaps and then creating and putting together the reconstruction is expected to take about a year. After that, the reconstruction of the Clapp Family Mastodon is expected to be on display in the fall of 2025.