How did the mastodon, Mammut americanum, feed itself? It is a fairly simple question best answered by looking to living elephants, but things were not always so straightforward. Early discussions of the mastodon focused, in part, on whether it was an herbivore or a carnivore. That its teeth were more rough and pointed surely meant that it had different dining preferences than mammoths or living elephants, both of which had flat molars for grinding plants. (If you want to learn more about these debates there is a wealth of recent literature on the subject; American Monster, Fossil Legends of the First Americans, Legacy of the Mastodon, and Big Bone Lick.)
The image of mastodons as horrible predators did not hold up, but even after it was established that the mastodon was an herbivore some still thought that its eating habits different from other elephantine beasts. Albert Koch, for example, mistook the fragmentary remains of a giant sloth to be those of a mastodon. Many of the bones of the skeleton had already been removed by people living in the Gasconade County, Missouri area, but among the bones Koch was able to recover were bits of huge claws. Could this mean that mastodons ate hand-to-mouth?
Koch's notion never really caught on, but others kept wondering if mastodons might be able to grab onto and manipulate food with their front limbs. In 1892 J.B. Holden wrote the following about the famous Warren mastodon;
The most important comparison is in the aspect of the fore-limbs. In the elephant the fore-limbs are columnar, as are the hind-limbs. In the mastodon there is a decided aspect, more or less, of prehensile capacity (as it were), that is, the latter have the fore-feet approaching the plantigrade in aspect, and were correspondingly adapted for pronation. Of course this is slight, but it shows the difference in probable habits. The fore-limbs of the mastodon with such development, we should expect, would be able to be thrown over the low foliage or brush-wood, and a crushing effected by the somewhat expanded manus. No such movement could be effected by elephas. As much as we naturally compare the two great creatures, and especially as both have similar nasal development, a near view of both together shows many differences in form.
[Unfortunately I have not been able to track down Holden's original article. The quote comes from an article in the American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal.]
Some, like Stephen D. Peet, saw this as a confirmation of Koch's views, but it does not appear to have caught on. I have not been able to find any later references to mastodons that sat down and played with their food with their forelimbs (although I certainly would be interested if I have missed something). There are differences between elephants and mastodons, surely, but none so great as Koch, Holden, and Peet supposed in terms of feeding. I only regret that no artists have attempted to illustrate a mastodon sitting down to a meal in the way these naturalists proposed!
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I hadn't read of this. Here are videos showing a bear using the rear limbs bipedally to scoop dead salmon off river substrate.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7892674.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7892602.stm
I don't think a bear on dry ground would be able to do that. Perhaps mastodons had some unusual foraging adaptations also.
Had chalicotheres been discovered by this point? I was just wondering if the discovery of a relative of the horse that had claws on its feet might have been at the back of peoples minds, at least as an example of what might be possible
I suppose you can add the clawed mastodon to the marsupial pterosaur, the creeping Diplodocus, and the Iguanodon with a horn on it's nose as an example of big mistakes science has made in the re-creation of extinct animals' lifestyles and anatomies (even putting animals in the wrong biological class.) The skeletal reconstruction you pictured of the Warren mastodon looks pretty flawed too: not only the claws but the body proportions make it look more like an elongated daschund than a bulky herbivore! Oh well, it's not the first such mistake made, and won't be the last.
The picture is another good example of the problem that naturalists of the 18th and 19th centuries had with the placement of the tusks of mastodons and mammoths. Peale's mammoth had the tusks curving downward under its chin. Koch's Missourium had the tusks pointing straight out and back. Several European museums inserted the tusks in the wrong sockets. With mammoths, the problem was that they didn't recover a skull with the tusks in place until the beginning of the twentieth century. Even though the Russian government had offered a bounty for mammoth skeletons since the time of Peter the Great, the discoverers of skeletons always cut the ivory off and sold it before notifying the authorities of a find.
You seem to have a better collection of pictures than I do; the migrating tusks would make a good post. But wait till you get Cohen's book; she has some wonderful images.
By the way, in Semonin's book he combines two Ludolfs. The first, Hiob Ludolf, went to Ethiopia and and published the wonderful picture of the carnivorous hippo. His nephew, Heinrich Wilhelm Ludolf, wrote the Russian grammar with its short explanation of the word "mammoth." I have a post on the younger Ludolf here: http://johnmckay.blogspot.com/2009/02/fragments-of-my-research-vii.html