He Thought They Were Baseballs — They Were a 10,000-Year-Old Giant's Teeth

He Thought They Were Baseballs — They Were a 10,000-Year-Old Giant's Teeth In the fall of 2024, a gardener in upstate New York reached down to pick up what looked like a baseball in his backyard. It was a tooth — the size of his fist — and just inches below it lay more. Over two and a half days, scientists pulled a complete, well-preserved adult mastodon jaw from his garden clay: the first complete mastodon jaw found in New York in eleven years. This is the true story of the Orange County mastodon jaw. A homeowner near Scotchtown, NY spotted two giant teeth in his yard in late September 2024 and dug up two more just inches underground. The teeth went to SUNY Orange, where Dr. Anthony Soricelli connected the family with anthropologist Dr. Cory Harris, who identified them as mastodon teeth. Staff from the NY State Museum in Albany and SUNY Orange excavated over about two and a half days, unearthing a complete adult mastodon jaw (genus Mammut) plus a toe-bone fragment and a rib fragment. Orange County holds about a third of New York's 150+ mastodon finds — the highest density in the US. The shallow burial puzzled scientists, and the jaw's carbon dating, diet and habitat analysis were announced as pending with no published results yet. In summer 2025, SUNY Orange students found more fossils in Wallkill, and the story echoes back to 1780, when preacher Robert Annan found giant bones a few miles away — bones General George Washington reportedly rode 25 miles in a sleigh to see. The jaw now waits at the NY State Museum. #Mastodon #IceAge #FossilDiscovery #TrueStory #MysteryDocumentary #NewYork #Paleontology #BackyardDiscovery #AncientHistory #SalaarStories