The Conway Mastodon, The Ohio Historical Center, Columbus, Ohio, ca 1970s
This postcard has a photograph by Paul M. Rowe of the Conway Mastodon found in Clark County, Ohio in 1875. The skeleton was on display in the Orton Museum at the Ohio State University until the early 1970s when it was moved to the Ohio Historical Center in Columbus. The unused postcard was published by Aladdin Studio, Columbus, Ohio and made by Dexter Press, Inc. of West Nyack, New York. The number 77889-C appears under the space allotted for a stamp on the reverse. The Conway Mastodon skeleton is regarded as one of the largest and finest examples in the United States.
Weighing about 4 or 5 tons the American Mastodon, found in the eastern states, was built like a tank with heavy, stout limbs, broad shoulders, a low cranium, two or three teeth in each jaw for masticating twigs, branches, and aquatic vegetation. Its distant cousins, the woolly mammoth and the Columbian mammoth, found in the western states, had more slender limbs, slopping backs, humped craniums and only one tooth in each jaw better for grinding abrasive grasses. All three stood about 10 feet high at the shoulder. Mammoths are more closely related to Asian elephants while mastodons do not have any surviving relatives.
Mastodons lived in herds and were mostly forest dwelling with a mixed browsing and grazing diet similar to living elephants. They probably disappeared from North America about 10,500 years ago as part of a mass extinction believed to been caused by the pressures of human hunting.
For more information, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon
https://geosurvey.ohiodnr.gov/portals/geosurvey/PDFs/Newsletter/Winter90.pdf
https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/the-conway-mastodon/BwGDwrm_nFRCHg
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