Marvin the Mastodon

Standing high above the highway in Stewiacke, Nova Scotia, is Marvin the Mastodon, a life-sized replica of a prehistoric giant that once roamed the region. Measuring 14 feet tall and 22 feet long, the enormous statue was erected at Mastodon Ridge in January 1995 to commemorate a remarkable discovery made just a few years earlier.

In 1991, while excavating a sinkhole at the National Gypsum Quarry near Milford, an excavator operator noticed a tusk and bones protruding from the earth. Further excavation uncovered the partial skeletons of two mastodons, an adult and a juvenile, along with the remains of numerous other plants and animals that had accumulated in the sinkhole over thousands of years.

Scientific analysis suggests that the adult mastodon was a male, approximately 22 years old, that lived around 80,000 years ago. Researchers believe the enormous animal may have been travelling through a boggy wetland, feeding on vegetation, when the ground suddenly gave way beneath its weight. Trapped in the sinkhole with a possible broken leg, the mastodon eventually died, potentially from its injuries, starvation, or drowning. 

Mastodons were prehistoric relatives of modern elephants that inhabited Nova Scotia during warmer periods of the Ice Age. Unlike the woolly mammoths commonly associated with frozen tundra, mastodons preferred forested landscapes and wetlands, feeding primarily on trees and shrubs.

Today, Marvin stands as a larger-than-life reminder of Nova Scotia's prehistoric past, while the original mastodon fossils are preserved at the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History in Halifax.