All-American Monsters–Part 4 (The Birth of Extinction)

Georges Cuvier proved extinction was fact, not heresy.

The discovery of such monstrous creatures raised troubling questions. Cuvier made the case that both mammoths and mastodons had vanished from the face of the earth; their bones were just too different from any known pachyderm. It was the first time the scientific world accepted the idea that any species had gone extinct—a challenge to the doctrine that species were a permanent, unchanging heritage from the Garden of Eden. The disappearance of such creatures also cast doubt on the idea that the earth was just 6,000 years old, as the Bible seemed to teach.

In fact, mammoths and mastodons shook the foundations of conventional thought. In place of the orderly old world, where each species had its proper place in a great chain of being, Cuvier was soon depicting a chaotic past in which flood, ice and earthquake swept away “living organisms without number,” leaving behind only scattered bones and dust. That apocalyptic vision of the earth’s history would haunt the human imagination for much of the 19th century.

At the same time, mammoths and mastodons gave Americans a symbol of national might at a time when they badly needed one.

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, the French naturalist, had declared that “a niggardly sky and an unprolific land” caused species in the New World—including humans—to become puny and degenerate. “No American animal can be compared with the elephant, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus,” he sniffed in 1755. Even the American Indian is “small and feeble. He has no hair, no beard, no ardour for the female.” Because Buffon was one of the most widely read authors of the 18th century, his “theory of American degeneracy” became conventional wisdom, at least in Europe.

Clearly offended, Thomas Jefferson (who stood 6-foot-2) constructed elaborate tables comparing American species with their puny Old World counterparts—three-and-a-half pages of bears, bison, elk and flying squirrels going toe-to- toe. In the early 1780s, he wrote that the mammoth, “the largest of terrestrial beings,” should have “stifled in its birth” Buffon’s notion “that Nature is less active, less energetic on one side of the globe than she is on the other. As if both sides were not warmed by the same genial sun; as if a soil of the same chemical composition was less capable of elaboration into animal nutriment.” When Jefferson sailed to Paris in 1784 to represent the new United States, he packed “an uncommonly large panther skin” with the idea of shaking it under Buffon’s nose. He later followed up with a moose. (Buffon promised to amend his errors in the next edition of his book, according to Jefferson, but died before he could do so.)

It wasn’t just a matter of wounded pride. For American envoys in the 1770s and ’80s, refuting the idea of innate inferiority was essential “if they were to obtain sorely needed financial assistance and credit in Europe,” says anthropologist Thomas C. Patterson. And they took every opportunity to make their point. Once, at a dinner in Paris, a diminutive Frenchman (in recounting the story, Jefferson described him as “a shrimp”) was enthusiastically preaching the doctrine of American degeneracy. Benjamin Franklin (5-foot-10) sized up the French and American guests, seated on opposite sides of the table, and proposed: “Let us try this question by the fact before us…. Let both parties rise, and we will see on which side nature has degenerated.” The Frenchmen muttered something about exceptions proving rules.  (To be continued.)

All-American Monsters–Part 3 (The Killer Nipple Teeth)

When similar teeth later turned up in South Carolina, slaves pointed out that they looked a lot like an African elephant’s. Early explorers also brought back whole tusks and bones from the Ohio River Valley. Americans soon started referring to the incognitum as a “mammoth,” after the woolly mammoths then being dug out of the ice in Siberia. It fact, it would turn out that North America had been home primarily to two different types of pachyderm—mammoths, like the ones at the dig in South Dakota, and mastodons, like the ones in the Hudson River Valley. Hardly anybody knew the difference.

European anatomists started to figure out the distinction by making side-by-side comparisons. The teeth of mammoths and modern elephants both have relatively flat running-shoe corrugations on the biting surface. But the teeth of the incognitum are studded with fierce-looking rows of large conical cusps. That difference not only indicated that Siberian mammoths and the incognitum were separate species, it also led some anatomists to regard the latter as a flesh-eating monster.

“Though we may as philosophers regret it,” the British anatomist William Hunter wrote in 1768, “as men we cannot but thank Heaven that its whole generation is probably extinct.” Benjamin Franklin, then on diplomatic duty in London, observed that the animal’s big tusks would have been an impediment “for pursuing and taking Prey.” Ever the practical thinker, he suggested that those fierce-looking teeth might be “as useful to grind the small branches of Trees, as to chaw Flesh”—and he was right. We now know that mammoths predominated in the open grasslands of the American West and in Siberia, where they needed flat teeth for eating grass. The incognitum, a smaller animal with less curvature to its tusks, lived mostly in the heavy forests east of the Mississippi River and browsed on tree branches.

Those teeth also eventually gave the incognitum a name. To the young French anatomist Georges Cuvier, the conical cusps looked like breasts. So in 1806, he named the incognitum “mastodon,” from the Greek mastos (for “breast”) and odont (for “tooth”). But laymen went on applying the name “mammoth” to either species—and to just about anything else really big.  (To be continued.)

All-American Monsters–Part 2

It started with a five-pound tooth.

In the summer of 1705, in the Hudson River Valley village of Claverack, New York, a tooth the size of a man’s fist surfaced on a steep bluff, rolled downhill and landed at the feet of a Dutch tenant farmer, who promptly traded it to a local politician for a glass of rum. The politician made the tooth a gift to Lord Cornbury, then the eccentric governor of New York. (Cornbury liked to cross-dress as his cousin Queen Anne, or so his enemies said.) Cornbury sent the tooth to London labeled “tooth of a Giant,” after the statement in Genesis that “there were giants in the earth” in the days before the Flood.

Man or beast, this “monstrous creature,” as Cornbury called it, would soon become celebrated as the “incognitum,” the unknown species. The discovery of dinosaurs was more than a century in the future, but in terms of this creature’s grip on the popular imagination, it was “the dinosaur of the early American republic,” according to Paul Semonin, author of American Monster, a history of the incognitum. Some primal force in the American spirit embraced it, he says, as “in effect, the nation’s first prehistoric monster.”

Based on the size of bones discovered near the tooth, the Massachusetts poet Edward Taylor estimated the incognitum’s height at 60 or 70 feet (10 would have been closer to the mark) and wrote bad poetry about “Ribbs like Rafters” and arms “like limbs of trees.” The minister Cotton Mather boasted that the New World possessed biblical giants to make the Old World’s “Og and GOLIATH, and all the Sons of Anak” look like pygmies.  (To be continued.)

All-American Monsters

Columbian mammoths and mastodons one ruled the continent. (Field Museum)

This is my latest piece in Smithsonian Magazine.  I’ll post it in sections over the next week or so:

In the blue shadows after dawn, the low hills in this stretch of South Dakota can look like a line of elephants trudging toward some distant water hole. It’s a geologic echo of the great herds of Col­umbian mammoths that used to wander here. They were like African elephants, only bigger. “A full-grown adult weighed ten tons. That’s as much as a school bus,” a guide tells the tourists on a sidewalk at the Mammoth Site, a paleontological dig and museum in the town of Hot Springs. She points out a set of brick-size teeth with corrugated surfaces like the soles of running shoes. With them, a mammoth ate 400 pounds of grasses and sedges a day.

Directly below the sidewalk, a volunteer scratches up dirt in a niche formed largely by the bones of dead mammoths. She’s got a big shoulder blade sticking up out of the ground off her knees, the round end of a leg bone at her right elbow, ribs like stripes painted in the dirt wall just above, and behind her a sort of cascade of half-excavated skulls and tusks spilling down to the bottom of the dig. Altogether, parts of 58 mammoths lie exposed in an area about the size of a hockey rink, sheltered beneath a roof built to protect them. Larry Agenbroad, the paleontologist who helped discover this site 35 years ago, figures at least as many remain hidden underground.

This is one of the world’s largest sites that display the bones where mammoths died, and it has some of the horror and fascination of a slow-motion traffic pileup. About 26,000 years ago, Agenbroad says, a sinkhole formed here and filled with water from a hot spring, creating a vegetated oasis that lured many young mammoths to their death. In places, the bones have settled in the posture of the animal’s desperate struggle to get back up the slick, steep sides of the pond, a foreleg flung up, the back legs splayed out where they pawed for traction in the mud below. Occasionally a visitor will imagine the fear and trumpeting of the struggling animal

Nature by Numbers

Lord, this is lovely.  It’s about how basic mathematical principles turn up in the natural world, and if I hadn’t been a sort of idiot savant at high school math (A+ rote responding on tests, D- real world comprehension), maybe I could tell you what those principles are.  But just watch:

The Living Toilet

OK, this one’s too good to pass up.  It’s a report about a pitcher plant that is literally a living toilet.  And it has evolved to digest tree shrew poo.  The little guys apparently climb aboard to do their business.  I’m a little skeptical, because it’s from the same researchers I dissed last year for their suggestion that a mountaintop pitcher plant in Borneo eats rats.  And also because the plant shown in this photo at BBC Earth News just looks too much like a toilet, with the lid up, and brightly painted like the one in somebody’s psychedelic flat from 1960s Soho.  Can’t you just imagine the researchers sitting around thinking, “We could have some fun with this”?  But, what the heck.  Here’s an excerpt:

Pitcher plants have elaborate structures which entice creatures such as ants or spiders into a precarious position, from which they fall into a fluid-filled trap, where they drown and are ingested.  These arthropods are thought to provide the plant with vital nitrogen and phosphorous, which it cannot obtain any other way.

Pitchers are the largest carnivorous plants, and the largest pitchers grow in Borneo.

One, known as Nepenthes rajah, is believed to be the largest meat-eating plant in the world, growing pitchers that can hold two litres of water if filled to the brim.

150 years after the discovery of N. rajah, we finally have an explanation for why the largest carnivorous plant in the world produces such big pitchers Carnivorous plant expert Dr Charles Clarke

This plant’s pitcher is so big that they are reputed to catch vertebrates.

“This species has always been famous for its ability to trap rodents, but I’ve been looking at the pitchers of this species on and off since 1987, and I’ve never seen a trapped rat inside,” says Dr Charles Clarke, an expert on carnivorous plants based at Monash University’s Sunway Campus in Selangor, Malaysia.

“This made me wonder …”  Read the whole story from BBC Earth News here.

Talking About Doing Dumb Stuff

With apologies for the absence of posts lately, I have been working frantically finishing up a new book, The Species Seekers, due out from W.W. Norton in November.  I’ll put up a sample sometime soon.

Meanwhile, here’s a talk and slide show I gave recently at CCNY, about my current book, Swimming With Piranhas at Feeding Time:  My Life Doing Dumb Stuff with Animals.