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Dan Kegley/Dr. Blaine Shubert holds a mastodon tooth rounded and polished in the river that once flowed through the Saltville well fields.  The paleontologist will appear next month in a new History Channel series’ segment featuring another Ice Age animal from Saltville.

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Ice Age tooth, bones discovered in Saltville

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

“Dem bones gonna rise again,” Boy Scouts sing about the Garden of Eden, and paleontologists could chant a similar refrain over the bluish clay in the Saltville Valley that yielded more Ice Age osteological fruits this week.
Paleontologists Dr. Blaine Shubert and Dr. Steven Wallace and others from ETSU and the General Shale Brick Natural History Museum and Visitor Center at the Gray Fossil Site and volunteers are spending the rest of July in Saltville recovering prehistoric animal bones.
This season’s excavations began this week under a new agreement that puts ETSU in charge of the field work and of the preservation and curation of finds on behalf of the Saltville Foundation. The remains will return to the Museum of the Middle Appalachians in Saltville in the future.
The field work is at SV-10, or the 10th paleontological study site designated in the Saltville Valley.
As of Thursday afternoon, excavators had retrieved a thoracic vertebra and two right scapulas from mammoths.
A tooth has been the sole find from a mastodon.
The clay is anaerobic, excluding the oxygen that supports the process of decay by which bones would have vanished or become little more than stains in other less suffocating soils. So fresh in fact are the bones, said Shubert, sawing off small samples for radiocarbon dating produces an odor like burning hair.
Radiocarbon dating measures the amount of a carbon isotope that remains in the sampled organic material. Its change from the atmospheric level of the isotope gives people like paleontologists and archaeologists a kind of stopwatch for measuring the time elapsed since the organism stopped taking in the atmospheric carbon.
Shubert’s sample, he said, dated 14,500 to 14,700 radiocarbon years which means the animal died roughly 17,800 calendar years ago.
The mammoth bones show signs of heavy scavenging by one of the bad-boy predators of the Pleistocene, the short-faced bear, and by dire wolves, themselves not so cuddly either. Shubert said the predators did not kill the mammoth, but feasted after its demise by some other cause.
A mammoth’s thoracic vertebra, missing only the ribs once attached to it, was so intact in itself that it constituted a rare find, Shubert said.
Other bones were rising to join these Thursday. A worker used a water hose to rinse away mud holding one bone fast in place.
The work at SV-10 will continue until July 31.
Next Tuesday, the History Channel begins a series called Jurassic Fight Club, a kind of retrograde reality series showing how confrontations between prehistoric beasts played out according to paleontological evidence.
The series will include at least one segment on the Ice Age’s short-faced bear. An episode scheduled to air Aug. 26 will feature Shubert in a segment on a short-faced bear that once roamed the Saltville Valley.