PRISCILLA COMES HOME

George M. Cole
and John E. Ladson, III
Aucilla Research Institute

Attendees at the Monticello Watermelon Festival this year may have been surprised to see a large skeleton of a prehistoric animal mounted on a trailer as one of the entries. This skeleton was named Priscilla. The background about how the skeleton of a prehistoric animal ended up in Monticello is an interesting story.
When most people think of extinct prehistoric animals, they envision dinosaurs who roamed the earth about 240 million years ago. For some reason, an equally awesome type of extinct animal that roamed North and Central America is typically overlooked. This is the mastodon. Mastodons are believed to have existed long after dinosaurs. They thrived until about 10,000 years ago when they became extinct due to over exploitation by Clovis hunters together with changing climate conditions. Their cousins, the mammoths, survived a bit longer with the last one dying on St. Paul Island, in the Bearing Sea, about 5000 years ago.
Our third president, Thomas Jefferson, was particularly fascinated with mastodons. He was an avid collector of fossils and bones and is said to have believed that mastodons still roamed parts of the North American continent. When he was a young man, he became enraged after reading a book written by a French naturalist entitled “Theory of American Degeneracy.” In that book, it was suggested that the people and animals of America were small and weak because the climate was too cold and wet to encourage growth and that the American mastodon bones were actually a combination of elephant and hippopotamus bones. In a response to the writing, Jefferson wrote, “The skeleton of the mammoth (at the time, wooly mammoths and mastodons were considered to be in the same category) bespeaks an animal of five or six times the cubic volume of the elephant.” Later he added, “But to whatever animal we ascribe these remains, it is certain such a one has existed in America, and that it has been the largest of all terrestrial beings.” Reportedly, he also sent a dead moose to the author’s doorstep in Paris as proof that large animals did exist in America.
While serving as the nation’s first Secretary of State, Jefferson supported a proposed mission to explore the American west and encouraged the would-be explorer to search for mastodons. Once he became president, one of his first actions was to loan one of the Navy’s pumps to naturalist Charles Wilson Peale to evacuate a water-filled pit and extract a mastodon skeleton. Later, he encouraged Lewis and Clark to search for mastodons on their expedition to find a waterward route across America. After that expedition, Jefferson sent Clark on another mission to recover bones from a known archaeological site. When he received the boxes of bones, Jefferson unloaded and studied them in the East Room of the White House by some accounts.
Although they were extinct by the time of Thomas Jefferson, mastodons did, at one time, thrive throughout North and Central America. Most mastodons are thought to have been shorter than elephants of today, but were more compact, heavy, and rather fierce-looking animals. Yet, they are believed to have been vegetarians with a diet of conifer twigs and cones, leaves, coarse grasses, marsh and swamp grasses.
What has been described as the largest mastodon skeleton found to date was discovered in the Aucilla River. It was detected in about 22 feet of water by Don Serbousek, a diver and amateur archaeologist, in a portion of the river called Little River, surrounded by a tract of land owned for several generations by the Ladson family. Although the river intermittently flows under and above ground in that area, Little River is a privately controlled, one-mile stretch where the river flows above ground.
When diving in Little River one weekend with friends in the early 1960s after receiving permission, Serbousek and his companions spotted numerous bones. As a result, they returned the next weekend with SCUBA gear to explore the area in greater detail. On that trip, they found a well-preserved mastodon skeleton in a 20-foot deep hole. Several follow-up trips were then made to recover the bones which included most of a complete skeleton except for the skull. After further searching, the skull was located, buried in blue clay beneath the other bones. Because of the weight, raising the skull to the surface was a challenge. They created a big lift platform with heavy canvas stretched between steel pipes and with inner tubes tied to the frame. Following several unsuccessful attempts and various modifications to the platform, the skull was raised and treated in a tank with acrylic preservative, along with the other bones. Although the bones showed no sign of human butchering, during the excavation process, two ivory fragments, a Clovis point, and other evidence of human hunting was found under them. This suggested early hunters had something to do with Priscilla’s death.
Due to its large size, Serbousek named the mastodon, Priscilla, after a large pig he had as a youth. Later studies of the skeleton have revealed that, in addition to being 13,000 years old, Priscilla was considerably larger than most mastodons that had been recovered. He was actually an old bull with arthritis in his lower back and shoulders and was extremely wide in the pelvis and ribs – over six feet from side to side. His legs were thick and stronger that other recovered skeletons. Low in the shoulders, he has been described as resembling a football fullback.
After storing the bones in a warehouse for twenty years where they had been periodically treated with acrylic, Serbousek and Jacksonville physician, Clifford Jeremiah, began putting Priscilla together. As they assembled the skeleton, they made latex rubber molds of each bone for potentially making models of the skeleton. After three years of that painstaking process, they realized the left front foot and a few other minor bones were missing.
The Little River Sector had been closed to outsiders since 1970, but the Ladson family allowed Serbousek and a group of prominent archaeologists to conduct further studies there in 1990. Serbousek was able to immediately find the hole where he had recovered the skeleton and found the missing foot buried there. That allowed complete assembly of the skeleton as well as the making of several fiberglass models which were sold to museums. The skeleton itself was sold to the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, Fla.
On his passing, Serbousek left his collection of artifacts, including a set of fiberglass bones of a full-scale model of Priscilla, to Dr. James Dunbar, former State Archaeologist and current chairman of the Aucilla Research Institute (ARI). Some of the artifacts went to the Florida Bureau of Archaeology, while the fiberglass bones of Priscilla and a majority of the artifacts were passed to the Aucilla Research Institute.
The bones were laboriously assembled by Richard Connell and Danny Woods of GFast, and the assembled skeleton made its debut at an ARI conference in April, 2021. Two months later, mounted on a large trailer, the skeleton has been taken for display at several schools as well as making an appearance in the 2022 Monticello Watermelon Festival parade.
Plans are currently being made for a homecoming for Priscilla in 2023. It is hoped to take the skeleton back to the Ladson Family property along the Aucilla River, where it was discovered, in connection with a conference with the theme of Priscilla Comes Home, dealing with underwater geology, paleology and water quality in Florida.