GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — The Clapp Family Mastodon, a 13,000-year-old collection of mastodon bones found in Kent County, caught up with the times this week as researchers created a digital replica of the fossil.
For the past two years, the bones have been drying in the basement of the Grand Rapids Public Museum's archives after they were donated to the museum by the Clapp family, who live in Kent City.
READ MORE: Mastodon bones unearthed in Kent City
In August 2022, a construction crew discovered the bones while replacing a drainage culvert on the Clapps' property. What they initially thought was a red pipe turned out to be a femur, a prehistoric one. Further excavation revealed even more bones — around 80 percent of a full mastodon skeleton.
"Usually you're lucky if they're 20 percent complete," said Dr. Cory Redman, science curator at the Grand Rapids Public Museum (GRPM). "Often you're finding a single tooth or maybe two to five associated elements or bones of the skeleton."
On Wednesday, Redman watched as a team from Research Casting International, a Canada-based business, scanned individual mastodon bones with handheld devices set to 0.5 millimeter resolution.
"Point and shoot," said Patrick Fair, a scanning technician. "Through this process, we could share this [data] with a paleontologist in London, a paleontologist in Ann Arbor, without anyone having to leave [the office]."
In the basement of the GRPM archives, Fair moved between a scanning table and a computer, checking the completeness of each digital replica. When one bone was fully scanned, he swapped it out with another.
"There's history underneath you. There's history all around you. There's science behind that as well," Fair said.
The history represented by the Clapp Family Mastodon — believed to be a younger male that likely lived into his teens before dying in what would become Kent City — will likely be on display at the museum in Fall 2025.
"It's going to be really impressive." said Dr. Redman, describing the first-floor exhibit. "It'll be nice. It'll be great."
