Places
How Cape Breton's Middle River became an unexpected treasure trove of mastodon fossils
On a day like any other in 1834, a Scot named Alexander “Big Sandy” McRae worked his hayfield along the banks of Cape Breton’s winding Middle River. But the day proved historic when McRae’s horse caught the edge of something in the ground. It was an ancient bone, almost a metre in length and as thick as a telephone pole, from an immense animal the size of which McRae had never known.
Five years earlier, Richard Brown, the first mine manager for the General Mining Association in Cape Breton, wrote in Thomas C. Haliburton’s An Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia of a strange sight in Bras d’Or Lake: “Enormous bones, resembling thigh bones, six feet in length, are reported to have been seen lying at the bottom of the lake.”
Earlier still, the Mi’kmaq people, whose traditional homeland (Mi’kma’ki)
encompasses much of the Maritimes, including the briny Bras d’Or Lake (Pitupaq), have told stories for generations of ancient giants that once inhabited the landscape before moose became king.
The Middle River bone, a right femur, turned out to be from an American mastodon, a furry elephant-like animal with large tusks that roamed North America between 10,000 and 125,000 years ago. Incredibly, before McRae’s horse tripped over it the bone had likely sat in that exact spot along the riverbank since the animal died, revealed only once the last kilometre-thick glacier raked across the province and etched the Middle River valley in the landscape.
In 1868, the bone was transferred to the care of the Provincial Museum of Nova Scotia (now the Nova Scotia Museum), where it has remained for more than 150 years. Recent analysis of pollen found deep in a crack in the femur suggests it’s around 80,000 years old. That means this mastodon was alive during the last interglacial period of the Pleistocene epoch, happily stomping through a mixed forest, taiga and tundra landscape similar to present-day Labrador.
“We think of them as ice age animals, but the mastodon actually lived in a temperature and an environment surrounded by animals that we would all recognize today, except for the sabre-toothed cats and the giant beavers,” says Tim Fedak, curator of geology at the Nova Scotia Museum.
The femur isn’t the only evidence of mastodons found in Nova Scotia — half a dozen specimens have been reported since, including teeth, bone fragments, tusks and, most significantly, the near-complete skeleton of an adult and the partial skeleton of a juvenile hauled out of a sinkhole at the Milford gypsum quarry in 1991. While scientists know these animals roamed throughout the continent, Nova Scotia’s unique karst topography makes it one of the richest deposits of mastodon fossils. Sinkholes and deep underground channels, which have been forming for hundreds of millions of years, are filled with old sediment — time capsules from ancient epochs.
“It really makes sense that these mastodons are being preserved in this karst system. And if it wasn’t there, we wouldn’t have the record of mastodons that we have,” says Fedak.
The near complete skeletons and other assorted bones are now on display at the Age of the Mastodon exhibition at the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History and will begin touring across the province this winter. For Fedak, he hopes these bones provide a unique vantage to also consider our currently changing climate.
“What we learn from the age of the mastodons is this context of the natural systems of climate and coastal change that have always been here. Adaptations have always been part of the natural environment,” says Fedak.
Tens of thousands of years later, understanding more about these mighty creatures might help to guide us through the Anthropocene era.
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This story is from the January/February 2023 Issue
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