13,600-year-old mastodon skull found in Iowa creek

A 13,600-year-old mastodon skull was uncovered in an Iowa creek, state officials announced this week.

Iowa's Office of the State Archaeologist said in a social media post that archaeologists found the well-preserved skull on the side of a creek bed in Wayne County Wednesday at an excavation site they had been mining over the last 12 days.

Throughout the almost two-week dig, several mastodon bones were recovered, but the skull was something unique, as it was the "first-ever well-preserved mastodon (primarily the skull) that has been excavated in Iowa," the post read.

" I never thought, in a million years that I would get the experience of excavating the skull of a mastodon," Facebook user Dan Clark wrote in the comments section.

Radiocarbon showed an age around 13,600 years old, the post said, and archaeologists will closely examine the bones to determine if any evidence of human activity, such as cut marks, exists.

Mastodons — a prehistoric mammal related to mammoths and current-day elephants — roamed the earth as far back as 23 million years ago. Mastodons went extinct about 10,000 years ago but their bones have been found across North America.

Some of these fossils have turned up randomly, while others are found by archaeologists who hunt for these relics from the past. In June, a fossil diver found a large section of tusk from a long-extinct mastodon off the Gulf Coast of Florida.

Last year, a tourist on a Northern California beach saw a gigantic one-foot tooth that once belonged to an ancient mastodon. In 2019, workers digging a sewer line in Indiana found the bones of a Mastodon. The haul included most of a tusk, parts of a skull and a jawbone with teeth.