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Fred the Mastodon
Fred the Mastodon uploaded January 25, 2013by the IndianaStateMuseum on YouTube Fred the Mastodon will be the centerpiece of a new exhibit, Indiana's Ice Age Giants: The Mystery of Mammoths and Mastodons, opening Nov. 2013. Mounting this 13,000-year-old skeleton with 85% real bone was a long process, captured in part in this time-lapsed video.
1998 - Dan Buesching was digging up peat in the pond for the family peat buisness and hauled up a mastodon tooth-filled skull, leg bones, part of a pelvis, two large leg bones and other parts. IPFW students soon joined in the excavation, and in the end it turned out Buesching’s find was one of the most complete mastodon skeletons ever found in this part of the country. Read about the mounted skeleton now on display as Fred the Mastodon at the Indiana State Museum in Indianapolis in the newspaper article Prehistoric find finally on display by Frank Gray January 25, 2013 on The Journal Gazette newspaper archived on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
They donated the fossil to the Indiana State Museum where they have it on display. You can also visit the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and at Science Central in Fort Wayne, Indiana to see the casting. Copied from Bueschings Peat Moss & Mulch About page. See Buesching Peat Moss.
Remains of a mastodon that perished millennia ago are being put back together at the University of Michigan. The skeleton of the 11,000-year-old female Owosso mastodon was taken apart this spring after standing inside the Ann Arbor school's natural history museum since 1947. Crews began reassembling her bones this week inside the new Biological Sciences Building next door to the museum. The ancient, elephant-like mammal eventually will stand beside a cast of the male Buesching mastodon that was found near Fort Wayne, Indiana. Both will be positioned in the five-story atrium of the U-M Museum of Natural History, which opens to the public in April. Copied from Mastodon skeleton reassembly gets underway at U. of Michigan by Mike Householder published August 12, 2018 by CBS WANE-TV NewsChannel 15.
The Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites secured Fred from the Buesching family in 2006 and spent more than a year having him mounted and prepared to be exhibited. His skeleton, which is about 9 feet tall and 25 feet long, has been on display since 2013. Copied from These Old Bones Will Tell Your Story, December 18, 2020, Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites. Over 500 comments to October 6, 2023 post Where Have All The Mastodons Gone? about 2005 Mastodons on Parade art pieces made by FW artists including a comment about Fred.
MORE BONES--Two thigh bones, the bones of the lower extremities of the calf skeleton heretofore found, and some vertebrae and teeth, and part of the skull of another mastodon have been dug up at the mastodon burial ground near Huntertown. - That corn field is rather rich in fossil remains.
If in fact they were taken to Chicago, we can only wonder if they survived the “Great Fire” of Oct. 7 and 8, 1871, which destroyed practically every building in the heart of the city.
In this article under The Locality it states: In size the skeleton was less than that discovered some years ago near Huntertown and cremated in Chicago by the fire of October 8th, 1871, and much less than the skeleton dicovered south of Arcola a few years ago.
It had long been accepted that the first discovery of mastodon bones took place in 1931. Found by 10-year-old Donovan Harper in a patch of muck south of Cromwell, they were removed by representatives of the Buffalo Museum of Natural History, where they are now on display.
An announcement that had appeared in an Albion weekly paper of Feb. 26, 1931, described a discovery of “fossilized remains” on the Fred Danner farm northwest of Wawaka. It was claimed that they were better preserved than those found a few months earlier in Sparta Township and sold to the Buffalo museum.
An interest had been shown in the Wawaka specimen had been shown by the geology section of the state conservation department which had considered its excavation and purchase for the state museum. Paul F. Simpson of the geology department spent several days inspecting the teeth and sections of bone, before it was decided that the expense involved in digging up the remains and installing them in the Indiana museum would be prohibitive. At that time it was observed that in past years several significant finds of prehistoric remains had been made in Indiana, only to have them taken out-of-state.
In a lengthy and well-documented account in the Fort Wayne Gazette of April 29, 1867, it appears that just a few days earlier discovery of a mammal took place in Swan Township, Noble County.
It was found in the farm field of William Thrush, whose Noble County farm bordered Allen County about four miles north of Huntertown. Discovered by a ditch-digging crew, the large skeleton was standing erect under about 4 feet of muck. Dr. J.S. Fuller, whose expertise was not revealed, examined the bones and declared they were remains of an “elephant” buried at least 100 years earlier.
A follow-up article appearing in the Gazette five months later remained enthusiastic and correctly referred to a “mastodon.” A total of three partial skeletons were eventually unearthed, with various theories offered as to how they became mired down and “got stuck.”
The bones were stored at the nearby residence of James Potter at Potter’s Station (later Ari). It had been named for the Galucia Potter family on the line of the Detroit & Eel River Railroad (later Pennsylvania) which ran diagonally through the southeast corner of Noble County, intersecting with the Grand Rapids & Indiana Railroad at Grand Rapids Crossing (now LaOtto).
The Gazette article concluded “The remains, we understand, will be taken to the Chicago Academy of Natural Sciences for more careful examination.”
If in fact they were taken to Chicago, we can only wonder if they survived the “Great Fire” of Oct. 7 and 8, 1871, which destroyed practically every building in the heart of the city.
Perhaps the best-known mastodon whose remains have been retained in Indiana are those of a restored skeleton displayed in the first floor in Kettler Hall on IPFW’s Fort Wayne campus.
Look at the size of those teeth! This mastodon jaw was discovered in Whitley County and is on display at the Whitley County Historical Museum.
Mastodons were similar to the woolly mammoth but had straighter tusks as well as different teeth and eating habits. They lived in North America during the Pleistocene period from at least 3.75 million years ago until about 11,000 years ago before going extinct.
Were Osage Oranges mastodon food?
Osage Oranges, Maclura pomifera, hedge apples, was sometimes used as living fences before barb wire became popular in the 1870s. Is native to the south-central states of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana. early French explorers referred to the species as bois d’arc or “wood for a bow”. Sometimes mentioned in early history books.
Pictured here is the fruit of Maclura pomifera (a.k.a., Osage Orange), a species in the mulberry family (Moraceae) considered native to the south-central United States (Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas) that has become naturalized in parts of the eastern United States.* The inedible fruit–which only resembles an orange–is “a syncarp of drupes covered with a rind and when opened oozes a latex sap.”* In other words, “Osage oranges are pome fruit or fruit that has a core of seeds inside an edible fleshy casing. Better known examples of pome fruit include apples and pears.”** As Master Gardener Linda Sedar writes in a Penn State Extension article, these fruit in Pennsylvania are often referred to as “monkey balls.”***
As the “fruit is far too large to be consumed by wildlife species roaming our landscape today but not those of the past,” writes Emily Swihart for Illinois Extension, “[i]t seems that Osage oranges are anachronistic fruit, meaning they belong to another time. Scientists hypothesize that the Osage orange belongs to the Age of Great Mammals, also known as the Pleistocene, when herbivores far larger than any that remain today roamed North America. Fossil records tell of megafauna roaming the North American landscape including mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths, and glyptodon.”**
To learn more about this fascinating species, check out the articles cited below!
** “Massive fruit, myths, and mastodons: Osage orange,” Emily Swihart (Horticulture Educator), Illinois Extension, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (Nov. 11, 2022) (https://extension.illinois.edu/.../2022-11-11-massive...). [article states: The superior wood strength of the species was appreciated by native tribes and used for tools, especially bows for hunting. People would travel hundreds of miles to harvest trees suitable for crafting the weapon to the extent that early French explorers referred to the species as bois d’arc or “wood for a bow”. ... Osage oranges are anachronistic fruit, meaning they belong to another time. Scientists hypothesize that the Osage orange belongs to the Age of Great Mammals, also known as the Pleistocene, when herbivores far larger than any that remain today roamed North America. Fossil records tell of megafauna roaming the North American landscape including mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths, and glyptodon. similar to mammals of today, these megafaunas would have dispersed seeds of vegetation they consumed. The Osage orange, perhaps, developed large fruit for these prehistoric megafaunas.]
We hunt the oldest Bois d’Arc trees in the richest hunting grounds of northeast Texas along the RedRiver. Here’s a handful of the oldest lowland Bois d’Arc giants, the oldest 350-400 years old . We have located numerous 300 year old and currently working with land owners to preserve the landmarks trees for future generation. was posted November 23, 2023 by Bois DArc Kingdom on Big Tree Seekers on Facebook with photos.
Buesching's Peat Moss & Mulch, the event’s presenting sponsor