Early American

The Florence B., a scallop boat, was scalloping along off the New Jersey coast last week, in 105 feet of water, 50 miles southeast of Ambrose Lightship. Among the scallops the rake dredged up a curious object: a gigantic tooth that would have taken a Paul Bunyan dentist with forceps the size of crossed crowbars to extract. The tooth was 6.5 inches long and Weighed 3.7 pounds. The roots were rust-colored and scaly, but the hard crown was jet black, as if the owner had chewed betel nuts.

The scallopers took their catch to New York, where Dr. Edwin H. Colbert of the American Museum of Natural History identified the tooth as the upper left third molar of a mastodon (a proto-elephant of the Pleistocene Age that tramped North America some 30,000 to 250,000 years ago).

There are two theories, said Dr. Colbert, of how the molar may have got so far from land, 1) The dead mastodon, enclosed in a block of ice, may have drifted down the Hudson--then a great, glacier-fed river. Some geologists believe that during the Pleistocene Age the ocean was lower because the glaciers that covered much of the land locked up so much water. So 2) the mastodon may have walked to the scallop bank on its own big feet.

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