Fairlawn Mastodon
The city of Fairlawn is home to many families. Youngsters amble through their neighborhoods, enjoying the green spaces and friendly atmosphere. But what did that part of town look like 10,000 years ago when a different youngster wandered though it? For Little Horatio—a local mastodon youth—Fairlawn was his swampy home. “Mastodons lived in Ohio during the Ice Age, or Pleistocene Era, and they went extinct about 10,000 years ago,” says Cassie Hall, a naturalist with Summit Metroparks.
During the Ice Age in Ohio, many fantastic creatures strolled the areas that now offer shopping and dining options galore. Where a mother with a stroller might now jog, an eight-foot-tall beaver might have walked. Instead of SUVs, giant land sloths parked themselves in open spaces of Fairlawn. This is the world that a young mastodon lived in. Vaguely similar in appearance to the modern-day elephant, mastodons were about seven to nine feet tall. They had fur covering their bodies, as well as tusks that extended straight with only a slight curve.
Much to their chagrin—posthumously—mastodons are often confused with the more popular Ice Age giant, the wooly mammoth. However, these two were not by any means the same. “Wooly mammoths are the ones you always see on TV,” says Hall. Standing 12 to 15 feet tall, the mammoth sported thick, wooly hair—perfect for a colder climate. They had two features that set them apart from the mastodon: a hump and curved tusks. The mammoth had a large hump on its back and tusks that curved up significantly. “[Mastodon] lineage is quite a bit different than the wooly mammoth,” says Hall. “The wooly mammoth can be more closely related to our modern-day elephants, whereas mastodons died out. They are really distant cousins to the elephant, [while] wooly mammoths you could call [the elephant’s] great-great-grandfather.”
Living in this area, mastodons would have found many amenities. The current Fairlawn was very swampy, providing a wonderful habitat for them. Little Horatio found ample food and shelter in this boggy quagmire. “It would have been the perfect place for him [to live] and subsequently—for us at least—an awesome place for him to die,” says Hall. “That swampy peat soil is what helped preserve him so that we could see his bones.”
Bridging the gap between the past and the present, Horatio provides researchers a portal to the Ice Age in Northeast Ohio. “He was called Little Horatio when they found him—little because he was a juvenile mastodon and Horatio actually means timekeeper—so they saw him as a window to the past,” says Hall.
Little Horatio wasn’t unearthed in a planned excavation. Instead his discovery provided an unexpected view into the past. In 1966, a construction crew was working on the basement to Billow Funeral Home in Fairlawn. As they were excavating the area for the basement, they hit something with their equipment. “Unfortunately, that something that they hit was Horatio’s skull,” says Hall. The impact shattered his skull, but there was still enough evidence before them to give the crew pause. “They got out to investigate, and somebody on the construction crew knew enough about history and dinosaurs to know [they should call someone].” Paul Wingard and John Teeter from The University of Akron came to the site to examine the find. The two scholars identified the bones as a mastodon skeleton and were fortunate when the construction company wanted to help them unearth the remains. Allowing the two men to use their digging equipment, the company halted progress for a few months while Horatio was uncovered. “Unfortunately, they were on a time constraint—business is business—and they only had so much time to dig, so they got about 60 percent of the skeleton out before [the crew] had to continue construction.”
Many of his bones are in small pieces and shards because of the rapid excavation. Despite this, they still allow current-day scholars a view into the past.
Horatio’s story is not well-known to the community. Hall says that she first heard of him while flipping through information about the city of Fairlawn. The mastodon was briefly mentioned as a blip in the city’s history. “I started asking around, and no one had ever heard about it. A few people [said] ‘I kind of remember that from when I was a kid,’ but I needed to investigate more.” In order to keep this unique part of our local history alive, Hall ran a program for Summit Metroparks celebrating his discovery. Her program highlighted several large points about the mastodon—the difference between the mastodon and the wooly mammoth, their lifestyle, and that they lived alongside humans. Hall also worked to dispel the idea that mastodons lived at the same time as dinosaurs. Mastodons were in the area 10,000 years ago instead of 65 million years ago when dinosaurs walked the earth.
Connecting the residents of Fairlawn’s past with those of its present, Little Horatio does exactly as his name promises—he’s a timekeeper that opens a window to the past.