Elephants, mammoths, and mastodons (order Proboscidea) have fascinated mankind since the dawn of prehistory. The first report of the American mastodon (Mammut americanum) in Michigan was during the nineteenth century (Lanman 1839). In the intervening 150 years, people have continued to find bones and teeth of the extinct American mastodon and mammoths (Mammuthus sp.) Most of these finds were bones and tooth fragments, and only very few complete or partially complete specimens were discovered. Presently, there are two mounted skeletons of the American mastodon in Michigan; one, probably a female, is at the Exhibit Museum of The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (Dorr and Eschman 1970), and the other, probably a male, is at the Highland Lakes Campus of Oakland Community College, Union Lake (Dorr et al. 1982).

The vast majority of these proboscidean materials came from occasional surface finds reported by farmers or amateur collectors (see for example Dorr and Eschman 1970, and Holman et al. 1986, and Appendix A in this paper). When locations are precisely documented, surface finds provide us with important information about past inhabitants and their paleoecology, but only bones and teeth collected in well-defined stratigraphic context can be dated and associated with particular environmental features.

The two mastodons focused upon here were uncovered at the Shelton Mastodon Site (SMS), a well-documented Michigan locality (Shoshani et al., in press; Shoshani and Zawiskie, submitted). Field work at the SMS was carried out during the summer months of 1983-1987, following standard techniques as described by Joukowsky (1980), Kummel and Raup (1965), and Rixon (1976). A detailed account of the findings at this site during the years 1983-1986 appear in Shoshani et al. (in press). In this paper, I shall provide a timely summary of the uncovered fauna and macroflora for the entire excavation period and briefly review the significance of the findings. The mastodons listed in Appendix A (which is an update to Holman et at. 1986), provide the basis for my discussion on the numbers of mammoths and mastodons in Michigan.