Mastodon

Everyone knows that there are two kinds of elephants in this world: Asian and African. The Asian is the only one that can be trained and the African ones live in harmony with their environment until hunters come by and shoot them. Scratch a little deeper, and the African bush elephant lives by destroying its environment and moving on to new areas, where it destroys that environment, cycling back to the original region over generational time; Both African and Asian elephants can be trained; and there are three, not two species of elephant in this world: Asian, African Bush, and African…

Detail of a Charles R. Knight mural depicting a family a mastodons. Fossils often turn up in unexpected places. As people have dug swimming pools, tilled farms, blasted through mountains, and quarried the land for minerals traces of ancient life sometimes come to the surface, from isolated shark teeth to skeletons of our extinct hominin relatives. Even fossil graveyards are found this way every now and then, like the one found in a southern Pennsylvania quarry a little more than a century ago. In late April 1907 William Jacob Holland, a paleontologist and director of Pittsburgh's Carnegie…