The first American Mastodon (Mammuthus)

    The first American mastodon to be exhumed was found in a swamp in New York state in 1799.  The artist Charles Peale (the figure at right in black, holding a sketch of the leg bone) paid $300 for the remains and painted this picture of the excavation. The possibility that such creatures might still be living in the darker reaches of North America was one of the motivations for the Lewis & Clark Expedition of 1803.

Figure © 1963 by Gordon Rattray Taylor, "The Science of Life"; text material © 2006 by Steven M. Carr