Treasures of Dental School’s old museum opened wide at exhibit

The Harvard Dental Museum once held 14,000 specimens, everything from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dentures to a prehistoric mastodon’s tusk measuring 11 feet in length and weighing 300 pounds.

Emerson’s dentures, which were manufactured around 1870 and are made of porcelain and set in vulcanized rubber, are still extant. But the mastodon’s tusk is nowhere to be found. Only an article from a 1929 issue of the Boston Globe remains, describing how the 50,000-year-old tusk was found near the Arctic Circle and transported by dogsled and boat to Boston.

“You’d think you’d never be able to lose an 11-foot mastodon’s tusk, but we haven’t been able to track it since the museum was taken down in the 1930s,” said Jack Eckert, the reference librarian of rare books in the Countway Library of Medicine.