A Grant County trout stream has given up the tooth of a mastodon, an enormous, elephant-like mammal that roamed southwestern and southeastern Wisconsin during the Ice Age.

The 8.5 inch long tooth was discovered earlier this month by a Department of Natural Resources heavy equipment operator working on a trout habitat improvement project. The DNR stopped work upon the discovery, but resumed late last week after being cleared to do so by a state archeologist.

Cale Severson was working on repairing a stream bank washed away by recent flooding and found himself in a “river” of rock scattered around the valley floor. “I noticed something really odd in that pile — seeing just two of the five cusps (of the tooth) — and realized it probably was not a rock at that time,” he says. “I grabbed it, and out came the 8.5 inch long molar.”

“It was truly an amazing find and a once in a lifetime opportunity,” says Severson, a longtime member of DNR’s South Central Region’s trout habitat crew.

Severson called regional fishery supervisor Scot Stewart, who stopped work on the project. Work resumed late last week after Wisconsin Historical Society archeologist Sherman Banker examined the site and tooth.

Banker concluded that the find was not significant. No other bones or other artifacts were found near the tooth that might have shed more information on the animal.

“We don’t know where it came from,” says Banker, part of the society’s Division of Historic Preservation. “It got washed out of wherever its primary context was and came to rest on a pile of eroded rock. There is nothing to be learned from it other than it came from a juvenile mastodon.”

However, Banker says, mastodon finds are extremely rare in Wisconsin. “These things usually come to light every 15 to 20 years,” he says. “They have to have died in conditions conducive to being buried so scavengers don’t tear the carcasses a part.”