Smithsonian Magazine has a story about the discovery of Mastodon fossils.  A homeowner was mowing his lawn in Orange County, New York when he spotted strange shaped poking up through his plants.  His first thought was they were old baseballs.  Subsequent digging revealed they were rather fossil teeth with a complete mastodon jaw.

The prehistoric finding, which is the first of its kind uncovered in New York in more than 11 years, was announced in a New York State Educational Department statement on Tuesday.

Mastodons were large, tusked, elephant-like mammals distantly related to woolly mammoths and modern elephants. Slightly smaller than mammoths, they existed around the world from the early Miocene (2.6 million to 23 million years ago) through the Pleistocene (11,700 to 2.6 million years ago). In North America, however, the enormous mammals likely survived even longer, meaning their presence likely overlapped with the arrival of humans on the continent. Like mammoths, mastodons disappeared toward the end of the last ice age, when a series of factors, including climate change and human hunting, drove many large animals to extinction, as Jess Thomson reports for Newsweek.