Ding! The sound that was made when the ball and bat collided was music to the Transylvania coaches and players’ ears, and a sound of almost eminent doom in the hearts of the Manchester College Spartan fans, players and coaches during a conference baseball game on Sunday, April 20th.

  
The ball was sailing at an arc toward the left field fence of Jim Gratz Memorial Field, which stood nearly 360 feet from home plate. As soon as left fielder Josh Buell heard the sound he turned around and started to run. “I knew that he (Transylvania hitter) hit the ball hard,” Buell said. “I started sprinting towards the fence to try and catch it before it went over but I tripped over something while I was running.”

  
With the scored tied at three in the top of the ninth inning, the game and first place in the Heartland Athletic Conference was on the line. The Manchester fans watched with terror as Josh Buell tripped nearly five feet from where the ball fell. He got up and threw the ball in but it was too late. Transylvania had already gotten an RBI to win the game and the conference.

  
Obviously frustrated but confused more than anything else, Buell ran over to the spot where he had tripped to see what had done it. “There was a giant bone sticking up out of the ground,” Buell said.

“I had never seen anything like it before. It wasn’t human. I wasn’t quite sure what it was.”

He was right. It wasn’t human. After he discovered the bones and told the coaches, they decided to call in Dr. Albert Williams of the Science Department at Manchester College, who teaches numerous courses in anatomy. Williams knew just from looking at the bone that was sticking out of the ground that it was the fossilized tusk of an extinct Mammuth Americanum, otherwise known as the American Mastodon.

Immediately after Williams determined that it was the fossil remains of a mastodon, calls were made to The Paleontological Society in Lawrence, Kansas, and some the nation’s top paleontologists were sent to Manchester to help excavate the rest of the fossil.

  
Mastodons first appeared nearly four million years ago, and died out approximately 10,000 years ago.

The mastodon discovered on the baseball field was believed to be around 12,000 years old. Paleontologists believe that it was actually killed by humans. This mastodon shows several fracture wounds to the top and right side of the skull, and there are also several small holes in the ribcage that appear to have been made by a sharp object such as a spear. It appears that the mastodon was first attacked by a group of prehistoric humans equipped with spears. Then as the beast fell the group beat it in the head with large stones until it died.

The mastodon, which has a lot in common with the present-day Asian elephant, would have provided quite the meal for the family of humans that killed it. Registering at over ten feet tall and upwards of 10,000 pounds, mastodons were covered in fur and had slightly curved tusks that sometimes reached five meters in length. While they may seem very similar to the ancient wooly mammoth, there are a few distinct differences. Mastodons have straighter tusks, backs, and skulls than that of mammoths. The largest difference was that mastodons were browsers and mammoths were grazers. This meant that mastodons mostly ate leaves from trees while mammoths mostly ate grass.

“The Manchester Mastodon,” as students have dubbed it, has already had a huge impact on the college. In fact, it has made such a huge impact that the school board of trustees has already approved a motion to change the school’s athletic name from the Spartans to the Manchester College Mastodons. While catchy and sensible, this has created uproar among alumni that prefer the Manchester College Spartan tradition.

Manchester College also received a huge grant from the Smithsonian Institute in order to create an exhibit in the new Science Center that will house the fossil of the mastodon. The entire skeleton of the mastodon was recovered in nearly perfect condition.

Along with a change of mascot names, there are also other changes being instituted due to the recent discovery. The science department has hired a new faculty member, Eliza R. Bones, who will teach classes in the new paleontology major.

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