A mammoth story you can sink your teeth into

VIC LEIPZIG AND LOU MURRAY

I’m not sure I’ll ever get enough of the La Brea Tar Pits and the

Page Museum. I’m fascinated by the fact open pools of liquid asphalt

still sit right smack in the middle of L.A. The Page Museum has so

many displays of ice-age fossils found in the tar pits that I see

something new every time I visit.

Vic and I have visited several times recently, mainly to gather

information for Shipley Nature Center in Huntington Central Park so

people can learn about extinct animals that lived in Huntington Beach

during the ice ages. On one visit to the Page Museum, I bought a

reproduction canine tooth that came from a saber-toothed cat, so

visitors to our local nature center could see and touch it. A

complete saber-toothed cat skull is on display at Shipley, along with

a skull of an ancient bison. These skulls of local ice-age animals

are in cases to protect them.

We want display items at the nature center that people can touch.

Therefore, next on my list of acquisitions was a reproduction

Columbian mammoth tooth to help schoolchildren visualize the

magnificent beasts that lived here thousands of years ago. I needed

to go to the Page Museum to buy the tooth.

It seemed silly to go by myself, so I took the Shipley crew from

the Orange County Conservation Corps with me for an educational field

trip. None of them had been there before. In fact, none of them had

even been to Los Angeles.

I expected them to enjoy the trip, but I hadn’t expected them to

enjoy it so much. They were thrilled with the magnificent displays of

reconstructed skeletons of a giant sloth, ancient bison, and

especially the huge Columbian mammoth with its 9-foot-long tusks.

The mammoth skeleton stands 12 feet tall at the shoulder and

towers over visitors. It was huge, but the largest bull mammoths

reached heights of 14 feet at the shoulder with 10-foot-long tusks.

We tried to picture early humans hunting such beasts, armed only with

stone-pointed wooden spears. It’s a scary mental image.

I asked the corps members to look inside the mammoth’s massive

jaws. There were two molars on top and two on the bottom, one on each

side of the jaw. The mammoth has only four teeth, but they’re huge.

Each tooth is the size of a shoebox, about eight to 10 inches long

and four to five inches wide. The surface of the tooth is fairly flat

compared to our molars, but it is ridged like a washboard.

Scientists tell us these teeth were adapted for chewing grass.

Like elephants, mammoths pulled up grass with their trunks, stuffed

it into their mouths and ground the roughage with their molars.

Columbian mammoths consumed about 700 pounds of grass a day. It took

a lot of chewing for them to reach their adult weights of 8 to10

tons.

Most mammals, like humans, go through two sets of teeth in their

lifetimes. We have a set of baby teeth, and a set of adult teeth. Not

members of the elephant family. They get six sets of teeth in their

lifetimes. New molars form behind, rather than below, the existing

molars, pushing the old molars out when they are worn down. Once that

last set of grinders wears out, the animals starve to death.

Mammoths went through their first three sets of teeth by the time

they were 6 years old. The final set came in when they were in their

early 40s. Their final teeth had to last a long time, because

mammoths lived to be 60 to 80 years old.

The huge tusks that mammoths grew are actually modified incisor

teeth. The tusks poked out through their upper lip and grew to

splendid lengths. Scientists believe mammoths may have used their

ivory tusks to clear snow away from grass, uproot vegetation, attract

mates or fight now-extinct local predators, such as short-faced

bears, American lions or dire wolves.

We found another interesting tooth display at the Page Museum.

Several juvenile saber-toothed cat skulls showed different stages of

adult teeth growing in to replace baby teeth. Some baby teeth! Even

the smaller baby canine teeth were several inches long.

After we were done with our field trip, the corps members went

back to Anaheim for classes. They attend school Monday through

Thursday after working at Shipley Nature Center, and on Friday

mornings.

On this trip, they learned that as the climate changed at the end

of the last ice age, the grasses the mammoths needed to survive gave

way to other vegetation. The kids totally got the concept that a

whole ecosystem of herbivores and carnivores died out at the end of

the ice ages 10,000 years ago, leaving behind as survivors the

animals we have here today. This trip gave them a lot to think about.

I didn’t find mammoth teeth on display at the Page Museum gift

shop, but I knew they had rare treasures like that squirreled away in

a back room. I bought one to donate to Shipley Nature Center. You can

hardly tell a BoneClone reproduction from the real thing. The

original molar from which the cast was made was found in a streambed

in Southern California, a reminder that great beasts once roamed the

land we live on today.

* VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and

environmentalists. They can be reached at [email protected].