Photograph as originally submitted to this page in the Historical Marker Database www.HMdb.org. Click on photo to resize in browser. Scroll down to see metadata.

Photographer: Howard C. Ohlhous
Taken: March 16, 2011
Caption: There is a Mastodon in the Cohoes Public Library
Additional Description: This is the first life-size restoration of an American mastodont (mammut Americanus) in the world. It was constructed at the New York State Museum in 1922 by Noah T. Clarke and Charles P. Heidenrich. For over half a century, millions of visitors saw this mastodont and the accompanying exhibits in the State Museum.

This restoration was based partly on the skeleton discovered September 1866 in a pot hole at the base of the Cohes Falls on the Mohawk River. Fifty feet of muck and peat covered the bones, which rested on a bed of clay and broken shale above a layer of water-worn pebbles and gravel.

Mastodons were relatively common in New York State near the end of the last Ice Age - 9,000 to 13,000 years ago. These "elehants with overcoats" browsed on twigs and branches of spruce, hemlock and pine. Undoubtedly extinction of the mastodon was aided by ancient man, who seeking food and hides, hunted these "cousins" of the modern elephant.
Submitted: March 19, 2011, by Howard C. Ohlhous of Duanesburg, New York.
Database Locator Identification Number: p147469
File Size: 1.175 Megabytes

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