We often associate dogs with bones, but the bones our canines might find aren’t usually six million years old.
But one dog discovered the fossilized jawbone of a mastodon – an extinct mammal distantly related to the mammoth and the elephant – on U.S. Army Corps of Engineer land on the upper Hanford Reach in Washington.
The manager of cultural resources for Grant County Public Utility District, Brett Lenz, came across the bone on Facebook. A corrections officer and rock hound had posted the fossil, thinking that it could be a dinosaur bone.
Mastodon or Mammoth?
“I knew right away it was a mastodon,” said Lenz, who in the past has excavated mammoth fossils in Ukraine, “The tooth structure is real clear”. Lenz got in touch with the rock hound, who showed him where his dog had found the bone, first sniffing around the area before uncovering the fossil.
The bone was in a rockslide of the Ringold Formation, which is formed of sediment laid down by the Columbia River, and it’s between three and nine million years old – so Lenz has estimated six million.
Mastodons differ from Columbia mammoths in that while the latter ate grass, the former ate twigs, leaves, and bark. As a result, their molars had pairs of cones better suited to a more crunchy diet.
Lenz thinks that the bone is so old that it could even be from an ancestor of the Pacific mastodon. He also believes that the mastodon would have been around 20 to 25 years old at the time of death, because the third molar had not yet erupted, but that mastodons could live to be around 55 or 60.
Giving the Dog a Bone
There’s a lot of contradictory information out there around dogs and bones, but what’s the truth?
Cooked bones aren’t safe for dogs, as they can break and splinter to cause injury. Rawhides and bone treats from the store can also sometimes be unsafe.
The best bones for dogs are those which are raw. Raw chicken, turkey, lamb, and beef bones are often suitable options. However, as with any bones, there is a risk of choking or damaging teeth.
