It seems like every child goes through a phase of fascination with the prehistoric, when they can recite to you in dizzying detail the names of all the dinosaurs, or explain the differences between mammoths and mastodons. Then, for most, this fascination fades and they move on to breeds of horses or major league baseball statistics, or Pokemon.

But not everyone moves past the fossil phase, and if you’re one of them you can join the excitement in Seattle this week where construction workers found a mammoth tusk!

This is the best science story on my Facebook since last month’s cojoined gray whale calves.

Folks from the University of Washington say the tusk likely came from a Columbian Mammoth, which would actually make it a mastodon tusk. Find an eight year old to tell you the nitty gritty details, but the short answer is that mammoths arrived in North America via the Bering Land Bridge, while mastodons were already in residence.

For me, mastodons bring to mind “mastodonic wassail,” which is the sort of phrase that could really have only come from Ogden Nash. He wrote a series of poems to accompany the compositions which make up Camille Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals. The following is his take on The Fossils.

At the midnight in the museum hall
The fossils gathered for a ball.
There were no drums or saxophones
But just the clatter of their bones.
A rolling, rattling carefree circus
Of mammoth polkas and mazurkas.
Pterodactyls and Brontosauruses
Sand ghostly prehistoric choruses.
Amid the mastodonic wassail
I caught the eye of one small fossil
“Cheer up, sad world”
“It’s kind of fun to be extinct.”

I grew up with a fabulous recording of Noel Coward reading Ogden Nash’s poetry to Saint-Saëns’ music. All three men, now joining the fossil ranks themselves, remain dear to my heart.

And mammoths — well, mammoths began to tickle around in my adult brain last year, when I read the following lines in the introduction of Anna Reid’s book, The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia.

…and the earth shook thanks to the tunneling action of mammoths, who expired on contact with sunlight.

For weeks afterwards, I told everyone I met this little snippet of mythology from the Russian Far East. It makes so much sense!

Where would the people of Siberia have found mammoths? Not as fossils, but as dead bodies melting out of the permafrost on river banks or other areas subject to erosion.

I began to consider the underground mystery of the mammoths, which soon got mixed up into another Ogden Nash poem. In The Adventures of Isabel, a little girl eats a bear without a second thought. If there was ever a girl who would meet up with the subterranean mammoths, it would be Isabel. Only she became Isobel for me, and then Sobel, and then it was not just one story but an epic which was hatching in my head for her.

Isobel and the Mammoths is a short story now available on Amazon*, Smashwords, Kobo, and percolating out to other e-book retailers. Sobel’s Skin, the first full novel in the Isobel the Bear Eater series, will be available March 1.

 

 

 

 

*Please feel free to report to Amazon that this title is free on other retailers. They won’t let me set it to free myself, but should eventually price-match.