Mastodon bones from the Ice Age discovered on farm in Southern Indiana

Growing up on their family's farm in Seymour, Indiana, Sue Nehrt and her brother would spend plenty of time playing in the field and creek behind their home.

They would often find arrowheads that turned up as their father farmed the 100 acres or so of land.

So when Nehrt's husband, Tony, received a call last week from an Indiana conservation officer regarding bones found behind the farm, she thought maybe they were Native American remains.

Not quite. The bones belonged to something much older and much larger — a mastodon, a forest-dwelling creature that lived during the Ice Age and was similar in size to an elephant.

"It's something you don't ever think was roaming around that many years ago," Sue Nehrt told the Courier Journal on Thursday. 

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Crews working on a sewer system project in Seymour that crosses the farm discovered the bones last week, according to Tony Nehrt.

Sue Nehrt's brother, Joe Schepman, who continues to take care of the farm off U.S. 50 in Seymour, went to check out the scene and sent Tony Nehrt photos of the bones on the ground.

"You couldn't really establish the size of the bones," Tony Nehrt said. "But later on, he sent me pictures of the bones in the back of a truck, and you could really see the size."

On Saturday, Ron Richards, senior research curator of paleobiology at the Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites, verified the remains belong to a mastodon.

The bones included parts of a jaw, along with a tusk, leg, teeth and skull, Tony Nehrt said.

Richards told The (Seymour) Tribune he believes the mastodon would have stood between 9 and 9 ½ feet tall and been at its full size of about 12,000 pounds when it died between 10,000 and 13,000 years ago.

"It's a pretty strange feeling when you see the size of these bones," Tony Nehrt said. "Just to hear the timeline of that particular animal, the habitat that they lived in, how things have changed around here. It's interesting information."

The Nehrt and Schepman families own the farm along with Sue Nehrt's cousin, who she said lives in Florida and is driving up to Seymour this weekend to see the exciting discovery.

No one lives on the farm anymore, said Sue Nehrt, who is 56 and lives with her husband in Brownstown, Indiana.

The families hope to donate the bones to the Indiana State Museum in Indianapolis. That would allow countless people to observe the mastodon remains for years to come, Tony Nehrt said.

The museum has the largest collection of mastodons in the state, including "Fred the Mastodon," whose remains were discovered near Fort Wayne in 1998. (The mastodon is also the official mascot of Purdue University Fort Wayne.)

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This is not the first time mastodon remains have been found in Jackson County, Indiana.

According to The Tribune, mastodon remains were reportedly discovered in 1928 and 1949 in different parts of the Southern Indiana county. Though mastodons appeared mostly in North and Central America, they eventually spread to every continent except Antarctica and Australia.

The newly discovered bones in Seymour have been wrapped and kept in water to try to prevent further deterioration, Tony Nehrt said.

Now, the Nehrt and Schepman families are wondering what else may turn up on the Seymour farm.

"When you wake up in the morning," Sue Nehrt said, "you never know what news you're going to get."

Reach Billy Kobin at bkobin@courierjournal.com or 502-582-7030.