MIGRATION OF MASTODONS INTO SOUTHWEST OKLAHOMA UTILIZING A SPECIALIZED ENVIRONMENT

Mastodons are a group of elephants that went extinct at the end of the last Ice Age (Wisconsinan). They shared the continent with many other now extinct megafauna including the mammoths, longhorn bison, camels, ground sloths, and horses. They were short stocky hardy animals, and had cuspate teeth that set them apart from other elephants. Mastodons were solitary creatures lacking large complex social structures found in mammoth and modern elephant populations. They preferred to be browsers than grazers, and it has long been thought that the main habitat of the American mastodons in this area was the parkland forest and they could not be found outside of this type of environment. Evidence for the parkland forest border lies in South Kansas and Northeast Oklahoma. Mastodons have also been found as close as the Big Thicket area in East Texas. These should have been the borders of the range of these creatures; however, there have been several recent finds that contradict this boundary. One is a lower jaw bone of a juvenile mastodon, verified by the teeth, discovered in the Cookietown area of Cotton County, Oklahoma about 15 miles north of Burkburnett in the Deep Red Creek basin. The areas around the modern fluvial environments of the Deep Red Creek area constitute a forest fringe or riparian environment. Comparing the ancient and modern species of mussels that are found in the same creek, it is seen that the environment was not that different from today's. This environment would have exponentially increased the range of these animals and created extensive routes for colonization of the plains. Additional finds in the same area are of grazing plains animals, showing that they lived side by side with the mastodons. This contradicts the standard model of a forest only environment for these elephants.