“This is the Mona Lisa of paleontology,” Tassy said, pointing to the
largest of the group. “The beginning of everything. It’s incredible because
Cuvier himself made the drawing of this tooth. So he looked at it very
carefully.” Tassy pointed out to me the original catalog numbers, which
had been painted on the teeth in the eighteenth century and were now so
faded they could barely be made out.
I picked up the largest tooth in both hands. It was indeed a remarkable
object. It was around eight inches long and four across—about the size of
a brick and nearly as heavy. The cusps—four sets—were pointy, and the
enamel was still largely intact. The roots, as thick as ropes, formed a solid
mass the color of mahogany.
This engraving of mastodon teeth was published with a description by Cuvier in 1812.
From an evolutionary perspective, there’s actually nothing strange
about a mastodon’s molars. Mastodon teeth, like most other mammalian
teeth, are composed of a core of dentin surrounded by a layer of harder
but more brittle enamel. About thirty million years ago, the proboscidean
line that would lead to mastodons split off from the line that would lead to
mammoths and elephants. The latter would eventually evolve its more
sophisticated teeth, which are made up of enamel-covered plates that
have been fused into a shape a bit like a bread loaf. This arrangement is a