| Mammoth and mastodon remains created excitement
and confusion when they began appearing in Europe, and particularly America,
during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Debate raged over
whether these bones, tusks, and skulls represented existing species, fossils
of extinct animals, or some other mystery of creation. Some commentators
speculated that the relics came from a race of antediluvian human giants.
Jefferson
thought that they could not be the remains of New World elephants or hippopotami,
but he believed that such creatures might still exist in North America.
He argued, against Buffon and others, that New World species were not debased
or lesser forms of Old World creatures. Rembrandt Peale, son to Charles
Willson Peale and born in 1778, published an essay on the Spring 1801
excavation of the skeleton of a mammoth discovered in New York. In this
essay, Rembrandt acknowledges the similarities between the mammoth's skeleton
and that of the elephant. He is particularly attentive to the mammoth's
great size and the greater curve and "spiral twist" of the mammoth's tusks
in comparison to the elephant. He concludes that the mammoth must have
been "the first and largest of terrestrial animals" due to its immense
size. In addition, according to Rembrandt, the discoveries of such skeletons
and bones prove "beyond the reach of question" that such animals did
at
one time exist: "these great facts speak an universal language, and compel
us to believe that a time has been when numbers of animals . . . larger
animals than now remain, existed, had their day, and have perished; and
yet the fanciful chain of nature is not broken! or else a new chain has
taken place of the old." Such discoveries contributed to a discourse of
fossils and extinct species that influenced naturalists, politicians, and
poets. (A.N.) |
