You Could Have a Mastodon Skull Worth $200k in Your Backyard
Southern Michigan had more of these gentle giants than any place else, and we also boast the world's best museum exhibit about them
Ann Arbor — Who were the earliest Michigan Enjoyers? Mastodons! They knew a great state when they saw one. There were far more mastodons in Michigan than any place in the world.
Which is why we keep digging them up. People find mastodon bones, teeth, and tusks here all the time, and we occasionally find a full skeleton, too.
They’re all concentrated in the southern part of the Lower Peninsula, and if you live in an area that used to be a swamp or marsh, you might want to start digging.
The mastodon was a massive cousin of mammoths and elephants that roamed the earth until about 11,000 years ago. They were a little bit bigger than present-day elephants, standing 8-10 feet tall and weighing as much as six tons. They had enormous tusks, some as long as 16 feet.
Mastodons were not dinosaurs. They were giant mammals that lived mostly in North and Central America. They lived alongside humans during the last ice age, which is part of the reason they went extinct. Overhunting by humans and warming temperatures eventually killed them all off.
Mastodons first appeared about 4 million years ago, long after the last dinosaurs went extinct (about 66 million years ago). They were doing just fine until humans came along.
And Michigan had far and away more mastodons than any place on the planet. They were plant eaters, and Michigan had an ideal habitat, with plenty of spruce oak forests, wetlands, and bogs. About 300 mastodons have been found in Michigan, including several nearly complete skeletons. By comparison, Ohio has about 150 mastodon sites and New York has about 140.
Michigan also has the only set of mastodon footprints ever found, a trackway that was discovered in Saline back in 1992. It’s worth noting that the Ann Arbor/Saline area has the most mastodon sites in the state.
Michigan also had wooly mammoths roaming around back then, in addition to a giant species of beaver called a Castoroides that weighed 300 pounds and was as big as a black bear. Somebody dug up a skull from one of those giant beavers in Niles back in 1920.
This was certainly the place to be in the Pleistocene era. Of all the cool beasts hanging out in Michigan, though, the mastodon ruled the roost. Those things were everywhere.
So it’s fitting that since Michigan is also home to the best mastodon exhibit in the world. You’ll find it at the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History in Ann Arbor, where admission is always free. They have two full mastodon skeletons on display—a female found in Owosso in 1944 and a male that was discovered in the Thumb in 2016. It’s the only museum in the world that has a male and female pair on display.
The Owosso mastodon made headlines when it was discovered in 1944, and ownership had to be decided by a court. It was found by a man from Indiana named Herman White, who had been hired to do some digging with his power shovel by a farmer in Owosso named Michael Remenar.
When White found the bones on Remenar’s farm, he attempted to use the old “finders keepers” principle and hauled them all to the chicken coop at the house he was renting. The mastodon is mine, he said. Remenar took him to court, saying that because it was his farm, it was his mastodon. The court ruled in favor of the farmer, and Remenar sold it to the University of Michigan.
The cool thing is that the Michael Remenar mastodon, which has been on display at U-M for more than 70 years, is the real skeleton—the actual fossils that were dug up in Owosso. Most mastodon displays (including the male at U-M) are replicas or casts, while the actual fragile bones sit elsewhere.
That’s the case with the most recent mastodon found in Michigan, which was found in Newaygo County in 2022 by a crew doing drainage work. They found 70% of the bones, and the family that owned the property donated it to the Grand Rapids Public Museum. The mastodon that’s on display in Grand Rapids was painstakingly created bone-by-bone by a 3D printer. Still, it’s a very cool exhibit.
The other mastodon display in Michigan is at the Cranbrook Institute of Science in Bloomfield Hills. They have pieces of a mastodon that was found in 1934 in a Bloomfield Hills pond.
If you dig around in your backyard and you find some mastodon bones, teeth or pieces of tusk, how much are they worth? It varies.
A small bone will fetch about $150 to $450, while teeth start at $400 for a juvenile molar and go up to $5,000 or more for an exceptional adult tooth. Tusks are worth $400 to $500 per pound. A full tusk could be worth as much as $10,000.
If you’re lucky enough to find a full mastodon skull on your property, then you’re talking some real money. Back in 2008, a skull found in Texas sold for $191,200 at auction. Start digging!
