Face to Watch

Warren allmon' 82 recently unearthed an 11,000-year-old mastodon skeleton in a back yard in Hyde Park, New York. As director of the Paleontological Research Institution (PRI) in Ithaca, New York, Ailmon was called in by homeowners who had come across a foreleg bone while deepening a pond. The pond had filled with vegetation over the years, turning into a peat bog able to preserve the only skeleton of an extinct large mammal found in New York in the past 100 years. "It was a media circus," he says, "but a once-in-a-life time event for the volunteers, many of them alums from the College who just showed up." They dug up more than 180 bones—including the skull, left, "about the size of a large trunk, no pun intended," says Ailmon—and are prepping them for display at PRI. The Discovery Channel is filming a documentary to be aired this fall. You can read about the dig at PRI's Website, www.priweb.org/mastodon.