The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
Searched, not assumed
No documented mastodon, mammoth or fossil find in Union Township — in a region where ditching struck them regularly. The test was run across the published and indexed record — proboscidean occurrence searches for the county and township, the Paleobiology Database class, and the Lakeville-specific forms — and returned nothing for Union Township, Lakeville, or elsewhere in St. Joseph County. The negative is a finding because the record class demonstrably exists nearby: mastodon remains are "relatively common in Indiana"; the Glasford/Parrish mastodon came out of a peat bog on the Maxinkuckee Moraine in Fulton County, exposed by ditching; the Garrett mastodon was found in 1933 by a highway worker probing for drain tile; "Fred" came from near Fort Wayne in 1998, "Joseph" from Medaryville in 1960, the Overmyer mastodon from a Fulton County drainage ditch in 1978. One false lead is resolved here so it is never repeated: the rich "Union Township" mastodon chapters of One Township's Yesterdays — Bland's 1874 find, the 1929 dredge find, the 1934 airport tooth — belong to Union Township, Marshall County, the Lake Maxinkuckee township, not this one; even for its own ground that history claims no find. The process reading prints plainly: this township's buried surface is exactly the ground where a bog-preserved skeleton could rest, and it was ditched at exactly the era when ditching elsewhere was striking bone — the exposure events happened here; the documented find did not, or was never recorded.