What to know about the Moon Mammoth that inspired an Erie SeaWolves alternative identity

A shaggy youngmale mammoth, weighing about the same as an ambulance, his tusks 8 feet long,once ate the grasses in whattoday is Erie County. He might have encountered humans, although it's unlikely they were what killed him when he was around the age of 30.

Twelve thousand years later, give or take a century, his bones were discovered by diver George Moon in a local lake. Thirty-four years after that, he's become the new limited-time namesake and mascot for the Erie SeaWolves, an affiliate of the Detroit Tigers baseball team.

John Oliver of HBO’s "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" offered a total rebrand of one Minor League Baseball team in the country andthe SeaWolves were selected.On his June 29 show, Oliver revealed the team's new identity as the Moon Mammoths.

The SeaWolves will play as the Erie Moon Mammoths, with a giant purple mascot named Fuzz E. Mammoth, on July 19, Aug. 19, Sept. 12 and Sept. 13. The team's on-field jerseys will include moons and a patch of an illustrated woolly mammoth wearing a space helmet. Oliver is expected to attend the game and Moon has been invited, according to the SeaWolves.

The Erie SeaWolves will be known as the Erie Moon Mammoths for four games in 2025.

While the Moon Mammoth's path to newfound fame is known, how the original animaldied and ended up at the bottom of Lake Pleasant isstill mostly mystery, although there's been some speculation as his rare skeleton hasbeen studied at universities. Since his first bone was pulled from the water 34 years ago, the public has only been allowed to see him for a single day, in 2012, spread out on a table in Harrisburg.

He won't be standing at the ballpark for any of the games or even sitting in a suite. He's fragile. Putting him ondisplay could jeopardize the bones that might reveal more to researchers in the future.

Meet the Moon Mammoth

Namedfor Moon, who pulled its nearly 3-foot-long shoulder bladefrom the bottom of the Venango Township lake, the Moon Mammoth resides at The State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg after spending time at universities in Erie and in Michigan. Photos of the bones can be viewed in the museum's online collection.

"It's one of the most complete mammoths we have from here in Pennsylvania," Linda Powell, a museum educator at the statefacility, told the Erie Times-News in a 2021 story.

About 80% of its bones, including both tusks, were retrieved from thelake's bottom.

"Specimens as complete as this one are pretty rare," Powell said.

It's also rare to getto see this one, even for its discoverer. Moon said in 2021 that he viewed it a few times when it was still in Erieat Gannon University, where it first went after he and four other divers broughtmore bonesout of the lake in August 1991. Then he didn't see it again untilOct. 17, 2012, when the mammothwas displayed at the state museum for one day before going into storage for scientific study.

George Moon, of Summit Township, found bones of a mammoth while diving in 1991 in Lake Pleasant. He is shown at home on July 17, 2021. The bones have been stored at the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg since 2012.

A fewpeopleover the years have saidit shouldbe brought back to Erie County, where it lived and died, and be put in an exhibit, possibly at the Tom Ridge Environmental Center.

A museum spokesman said there's a simple reason why that hasn't happened.

"It's just too fragile to put on display for any length of time," said Howard Pollman, director of external affairs for the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, of which the state museum is part.

"Our first responsibility is to preserve that mammoth indefinitely for future generations," he said in 2021.

A mammoth's life and death

This particular mammoth lived about 10,000 B.C.Most other mammoths died out within a couple thousand years of that, possibly due to environmentalchanges and humans. The mammoths'closest living kin is the elephant.

"We do know it was a male," Powell said about the Moon Mammoth. He was maturebut young,believed to be in his mid-20s to early 30s, shesaid. Had he not died when he did, he might have lived to be two or three timesthat age. He was also a hybrid species, Powell said, a combination of mammuthus primigenius,or woolly mammoth, and mammuthus columbi, or Columbian mammoth.

Alive, the Moon Mammoth would have weighed 5 or 6 tons and stood 9 feet or 10 feet tall at the shoulder.

"In that respect, he's a pretty normal mammoth," Powell said.

The mammoth from Erie County would have had a hump on his back and longish shaggy fur. Based on hair found with other mammoth remains, he likely would have been medium brown to dark brown in color, Powell said. As a herbivore, he would have grazed on grasses in the fields of what is now Erie County, she said.

Generally speaking, prehistoric animals like the mammoth are just pretty cool, she said.

Nothing like them exists naturally today in the state, where bears and elk are about as big as it gets.

What caused the the Moon Mammoth's deathand what led it to the bottom ofLake Pleasant aren't known for certain, although Powell said there has been speculation.

She said there are marks on his bones that some observers believe could have been made by humans. She said there's been no confirmation of humans killing mammoths east of the Mississippi River. One theory was that, no matter how thismammoth died, humans processed hisremains and stored them in the lake.

A mammoth's discovery

Moon, who lives in Summit Township,said in 2021 that he didn't remember the date of his fateful dive in Lake Pleasant, other than it was the summer of 1991. He said he was maybe 75 feet to 80 feet from the shore, where it slopedfrom a depth of 11 feet to 18 feet.

"Visibility back then was probably 4to 5feet," he said in a telephone interview. "(The) minute you touch the bottom and stir up the mud, it goes to zero."

Moon, who was in his early 30s then,had just finished a divewith another man and had decided to take "a quick little relaxing dive by myself," he recalled 30 years later.

Sticking up from the bottom of the lake was a piece of bone.

"It was really big," he said. "I just pulled it up."

One of these two scapulae from the Moon Mammoth was the bone that diver George Moon first saw sticking up from the bottom of Lake Pleasant in Venango Township in 1991.

Roughly triangular in shape and measuring2½ feet to 3 feet long and about 1 foot at its widest, Moon at first thought it was a dinosaur bone. He took it to the surface and showed the other man before diving back down under the water and putting the bone back in the mud. Moon said he did that because he didn't want the bone to dry out and crumble.

Later that day, he was at a friend's house with someone who worked at Gannon University whohelped put him in contact withM. Jude Kirkpatrick, then aprofessor of anthropology at Gannon. They eventually met at Lake Pleasant, where Moon once again pulled out the bone. He saidKirkpatrick told him it wasn't from a dinosaur and took it to Gannon. It turned out to be the scapula or shoulder bone of a mammoth.

How the Erie Moon Mammoths came to be: Inside the ‘Last Week Tonight’ rebrand of SeaWolves

Moon said Kirkpatrick wanted to know if there were more bones down there inLake Pleasant. Known as a kettle lake, itwas created when glaciers receded from the area and is nowowned by the state and managed by the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission.

"I reached down in the mud and said, 'There's all kinds of bones down there,'" Moon recalled.

He said they didn't bring them up right away, waiting to get permission from the commission and to arrange to preserve the bones. He said he and four other divers then spent the better part of August 1991 bringing up bones.

"They went from the lake to Gannon," he said.

The work was done without fanfare to protect the mammoth from souvenir hunters. As late as a July 1994Erie Daily Times story about the mammoth, the site where it was found wasstill undisclosed and referred to only as a lake in southern Erie County. In that same story, Kirkpatrick talked about using technologyto create three-dimensional images of the mammoth skeleton on a computer screen. He also said no one had approached him about the possibility of reassembling the skeleton for a museum.

About 200bonesended up being removed fromLake Pleasant. That included the other shoulder blade;both curved tusks, measuring about 8 feet each;andmolars, the lower jaw, humerus, radius, ulna, pelvis, vertebrae, ribs and foot bones. The upper skull was never located.

Moon said he dove in Lake Pleasant a lot after the the mammoth discovery but never found more of its bones or anything else nearly so exciting.

"I think we pretty much cleared that site. One was big enough," he said about his discovery. "I didn't want to be greedy and look for two."

The Moon Mammoths will take the field for the first time July 19, 2025 in purple and black uniforms complete with new mascot, Fuzz E. Mammoth.

At some point later in the 1990s, the mammoth bones were loaned to the University of Michigan for research. They were returned to Pennsylvania, which owns the skeleton,not long before their one-day displayin 2012.

Moon, who was 61 in 2021 and described himself as a union laborer who worked at nuclear power plants and did highway work,said he was on a jobnear Lancaster at the time of the exhibit in Harrisburg so he went to see it. His parents drove down from Erie.

He said he likes having a mammoth skeleton named for him, especially since he doesn't have children.

"That's my contribution," he said. "That's what I'm leaving behind."

A mammoth's future

Powell said in 2021 that the Moon Mammoth was stored in The State Museum of Pennsylvania's paleontology section.

Both tusks were kept in special encasements to protect them. She said the tusks were "quite fragile and flaking."

She said one of the museum's roles is assuring the preservation of its collection.

"It's very important to preserve these specimens and have them available for study and research," Powell said.

She wasn't aware of any future effortsto display the Moon Mammoth.

"I don't know of any plans right now for any of it to be put back on exhibit but that could change," Powell said at the time. She added that any display probably wouldn't include the tusks because of their condition.

The Moon Mammoth is displayed at The State Museum of Pennsylvania, where it was shown to the public for one day in October 2012. The skeleton was found by George Moon in Erie County's Lake Pleasant in 1991 and has inspired the Erie SeaWolves' temporary identity as the Erie Moon Mammoths.

Pollman, from the PHMC, said that in general, only a small percentage of any museum's collection is on display. He said a purpose of suchcollections is "the protection of artifacts such as this" mammoth.

The State Museum of Pennsylvania does have a mastodon skeleton that the public can view. Although often mistaken for one another, mammoths and mastodons differed in numerous ways, including their teeth and what they ate. Mammoths were also slightly larger.

Pollman said the mastodon on exhibit was less delicate than the Moon Mammoth and still required a lot of money and effort to display, including construction of a steel superstructure to hold it in place.

The Moon Mammoth is too fragile to put up like that. And Pollman said it would require a lot to make a cast of everyone of its bones to display.

So they remain in storage and are "available for study upon request," he said.

George Moon hasn't pushed for the mammoth's return to Erie County andsaid he understood it could cost maybe even millions of dollars to create casts and display the mammoth that bears his name. He's really OK with not being able to stop into a museum and see it.

"I'm sort of happy where it's at because I know it's being taken care of properly," Moon said 30 years after he found it.

Dana Massing can be reached at [email protected].

This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Moon Mammoth discovery behind Erie SeaWolves' new name, mascot