Inside of mastodon tusks first uncovered at Aurora’s Phillips Park over 90 years ago, workers recently discovered a package dated to 1935 under a layer of plaster.
The paper-wrapped, twine-tied bag was one of five such packages discovered within mastodon tusks when Aurora hired a company to clean the bones around the end of last year. Each of the packages contain broken pieces of the mastodon tusks, but only one had writing on it.
“I just thought it was really cool because of the potential of it being from that time,” Aurora Superintendent of Parks and Recreation Steve Kulesza said. “It’s like a time capsule. I just love the history of it.”
Written on the bag was a date, Jan. 11, 1935, alongside a note about it containing pieces of tusk and a name: Clarence R. Smith. Through a little bit of research, Kulesza learned that Smith was an Aurora University professor who did some of the early analysis on the bones to find out that they were from a mastodon.
The mastodon bones now on display at the Phillips Park Visitors Center were discovered in 1934, when workers from the federal Civil Works Administration dug them up during the construction of the park’s 28-acre water feature that is now called Mastodon Lake, for obvious reasons. Bones uncovered at that time included skulls, tusks, a lower jaw bone, ribs and vertebrae.
A Beacon-News article from the time of the discovery noted that mastodon bones had been discovered in Aurora and the nearby area since at least 1850.
Between November 2025 and this January, a project was undertaken to preserve the bones, extend their life and make them less likely to fall apart. Kulesza said it was “pretty intensive,” with workers scraping bones and teeth, shoring up fasteners and cleaning up areas where lacquer had dripped.
Through that process, workers found plaster within the mastodon tusks. While they were chipping away at it, they hit one of the bags and opened it, according to Kulesza.
He assumes that the packages were made a long time ago to keep the tusk fragments together, he said. The pieces of tusk from the broken bag are now being held in a glass jar.
Kulesza wants to display the packages and bone fragments alongside the newly-preserved mastodon bones at the Phillips Park Visitors Center. As amazing as the mastodon bones are, people likely won’t come back to see them unless there’s something new, so this will give people a bit more to look at, he said.
Plus, he plans to renovate the mastodon bones display with new cases and new information boards, including a new blurb about the packages.
There aren’t firm details on what the new-and-improved display for the bones will look like, according to Kulesza, but he expects the project to be done within the year. Plus, he may look into getting an intern to work on this project and to further expand the Visitors Center’s displays in other ways.
rsmith@chicagotribune.com
