Stand on the beach in Ocean City, New Jersey, and gaze eastward over the Atlantic. Beneath the rolling surf lies the continental shelf, sloping gently downward to its drop off at the shelf break, a hundred miles offshore. Now imagine time running backwards for twenty thousand years.The boundless sea drains away. North winds bring bitingly cold air. Frozen tundra and boreal forests appear around you and stretch eastward beyond the horizon. You’ve traveled back to Pleistocene New Jersey–the Ice Age.

Beginning two and a half million years ago, Earth entered a drumbeat rhythm of ice and thaw—glacial and interglacial, with the metronome set to 100,000 years. The tempo was kept by celestial cycles: subtle wobbles in Earth’s orbit, tilt, and direction, fine tuning the amount of sunlight reaching our planet. Each cycle, roughly one hundred millennia long, produced a glacial and an interglacial episode.

When glaciers grew, oceans shrank. Snow, born from water evaporated from the seas, fell and never melted, building mountains of ice that locked away vast quantities of water on land. Sea level dropped four hundred feet. From today’s Ocean City, one could have walked more than a hundred miles, across tundra and forest, before reaching the distant Atlantic coast.

And that great frozen plain was alive. Dire wolves hunted there. Ground sloths lumbered. Giant beavers paddled through icy pools. Musk oxen huddled in the gales. And great mastodons and mammoths trod over the permafrost, bellowing their calls in thundering herds. When one fell, they were scavenged or weathered away, but occasionally their remains would land in a soft spot–a bog or pond, perhaps–and fossilize.

Today, from time to time, their bones and teeth appear from the most unlikely source. Fishing boats working off the coast of New Jersey haul up not just nets of flounder or skate—but sometimes fragments of the lost frozen world that is now the ocean floor.

Recently, two such relics have found a home at the Edelman Fossil Park & Museum. One, the milk tooth of a newborn mastodon—teeth it used to nibble tender shoots and soft grasses before its adult teeth came in. The other, a massive molar from a mammoth, a natural millstone built to grind the coarse vegetation of Ice Age plains. Both were discovered by fishermen far offshore, on what was once solid ground.

American Mastodon (Mammut americanum) Milk Tooth

This baby tooth, dredged up by an oysterman, belonged to a young mastodon that grazed Ice Age New Jersey over 20,000 years ago. Used for chewing soft vegetation (babyfood), it was later replaced by the massive molars of adulthood. (Donated by Charlene Waldron)

These fossils are windows—portals to a world not so long gone. Mastodons and mammoths were separated from the dinosaurs by sixty-six million years. They walked among our own ancestors. The last mammoths vanished only about 3,300 years ago—by their demise, they lived in a world with pyramids, with written stories, and with beer fermented in clay jars. That’s this world. The historical world. A world we would recognize. And it was us, who helped end theirs.

It’s a sobering reminder. Even before we forged iron, we were a dangerous species. With keen minds, sharp stones, and fire, we could unmake millenia of nature’s work. Today, with more than eight billion of us wielding tools that would have been indistinguishable from magic by our forbears, we hold power over nearly every living thing.

Elephants—the mammoths’ living cousins—stand now teetering on the brink. The African savanna elephants and Asian elephants are endangered; the forest elephant, critically so. Poaching and habitat loss presses them ever closer towards oblivion.

Mammoth (Mammuthus sp.) Molar

Recovered from the New Jersey continental shelf, this late Pleistocene molar shows the broad surface and enamel ridges adapted for grinding coarse Ice Age vegetation. Like modern elephants, mammoths replaced their molars as older teeth wore down. (Donated by Tina Sevastakis)

And they are not alone, in the retelling of a very old story. The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists more than 48,000 species threatened with extinction—over a quarter of all assessed life forms. The World Wildlife Fund estimates that global wildlife populations have fallen by a shocking 73% since 1970.

But the story is not over. It’s in our hands, and as we teach in the Hall of Extinction & Hope, there’s still time to act. New Jersey may never again host mastodons and mammoths, but if we make space for the natural world, we can ensure the survival of majestic species like today’s elephants. Although we love our fossils here at EFM, let’s not make our wildlife a thing of the past.

Kenneth Lacovara, Ph.D.

Paleontologist & Founding Executive Director