Marshalls Creek Mastodon

In nineteen sixty-eight, workers digging at a peat bog near Marshalls Creek made an extraordinary discovery: the bones of a mastodon that had died roughly twelve thousand years ago. The animal belonged to the species Mammut americanum, a tusked relative of the elephant that roamed North America for millions of years before disappearing at the close of the last Ice Age. The Marshalls Creek specimen ranks among the most complete mastodon skeletons ever found on the East Coast.

Today it is preserved in the collection of the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg. It is a direct physical link to a time when enormous animals moved through these same Pocono woodlands, long before human settlement reshaped this landscape.