KENT CITY, Mich. — The process to restore a West Michigan mastodon continues. FOX 17 connected with the Grand Rapids Public Museum which gave us an inside look at the process.
“You can see the teeth are in just fantastic shape, I mean, beautiful. Preservation is really, really nice,” Dr. Corey Redman with the Grand Rapids Public Museum, explained to FOX 17. “So when we found the lower jaw, that was really exciting.”
It still will be several months before the general public can see these mastodon bones because special care must be taken to keep them from breaking down.
“On one hand, you’re like super excited because it’s really cool. I mean, you’re still, you know, you’re still, you still feel like a kid in a candy store. For another hand, you’re like, ‘okay, [I’ve got to] take this seriously. [I’ve got to] be careful.’ I need to know I need to focus on what I’m doing, so I don’t accidentally drop it,” Dr. Redman added.
Dr. Redman is one of the scientists who did his part when Kent County road crews discovered something they had never seen before in early August.
“They had already exposed quite a few more bones, and we were able to quickly determine that it was actually not just, you know, two bones, five bones, it was actually a partial skeleton,” Dr. Redman said.
Now, Dr. Redman is leading the restoration process.
“I just kind of never, never grew out of that hole…fossils, picking up rocks and, you know, dinosaurs phase,” he said. “I’m super excited about it, obviously. I’m the science curator, so this is totally my bag.”
That bag literally translates to preserving this incredible piece of history in West Michigan.
“Instead of bones being in individual bags, we isolated the bones in a series of bones on the shelves and cover the shelf so there is still some air flow. It’s not a lot of air flow, as you can see,” Dr. Redman showed FOX 17.
He says it will take dedication, time and about a year-and-a-half before the museum will be able to display these mastodon bones.
“They’re just saturated, and so we let them be this way. For a while, the water couldn’t drain out, drain the water off, and then we, you know, we kind of rotate them in a different direction,” he explained. “That crack is probably a result of just drying too fast.”
Dr. Redman also showed FOX 17 a pile of spoiled bones that were dug up before this discovery was really know. He says, if the process is rushed, it could be disastrous.
The owners of the land where this mastodon was found donated the bones to the museum.
Dr. Redman says, because of this donation, families will be able to learn about our West Michigan past for generations to come.
