Dinosaurs in the Attic

by Douglas Preston

  In 1846, John Warren, a wealthy professor of anatomy at Harvard College, bought the mastodon for $5,000. He had it crated and shipped to Boston, and hired a Mr. Shurtleff to remount it for display in his small paleontological collection. Several famous nineteenth-century scientists viewed the Warren Mastodon, including Louis Agassiz and the Scottish geologist Sir Charles Lyell.

  Apparently, Warren became dissatisfied with Shurtleff's mounting, because three years later he hired a Mr. Ogden to dismantle and remount the fossil. Ogden had his own ideas about what a fossil should look like, and he painted the bones with a layer of black varnish. Next he decided the beast wasn't large enough for his taste, and so he arbitrarily raised the ribcage and backbone two feet above the shoulder blades, thereby increasing the mastodon's height from nine feet to twelve. Finally, he sculpted a brand-new set of papier-mâché tusks, which curved in precisely the wrong direction.*35

  In the small but famous museum he established at 92 Chestnut Street in Boston, Warren exhibited the mastodon along with his rapidly growing collection of probiscidian remains from all over the United States and Europe. Warren died shortly after the turn of the century, leaving his museum in the hands of a trustee, Thomas Dwight. In 1906, Dwight wrote a discreet letter to Henry Fairfield Osborn, President of the American Museum, suggesting that the collection "might be offered for sale under certain conditions." Osborn, who had had a greedy eye on the Warren Mastodon for some time, set out for Boston on the same night he received the letter, arriving at the Warren Museum the next morning. (Extinct elephants were Osborn's [rue passion, more than dinosaurs or anything else. He spent fifty years of his life, off and on, writing his massive work Probiscidia, the two volumes of which weigh forty pounds. Its publication reportedly cost the Museum over a quarter-million—in pre-World War II dollars.) Osborn poked around the museum with Dwight, and after a friendly chat they settled on $30,000 for the whole lot. On Monday, Osborn telephoned his good friend J. P. Morgan, and asked if Morgan wouldn't send the Museum a check to cover the cost of the entire collection. Morgan readily agreed.

  So, after an absence of half a century, the mastodon was at last dismantled and sent back to its home state. Osborn immediately issued directions to have the skeleton remounted, and especially to have the varnish cleaned off the bones, which he considered a desecration. After experimenting with various chemicals, Museum technicians built a series of large vats and filled them with benzene, in which the bones soaked for many weeks. This was followed by a scrubbing with alcohol. The process worked; it bought out, as Osborn reported with satisfaction, "all the purity and beauty of color that characterized the skeleton."

  Repairing the original tusks presented a more serious problem. They arrived in many fragments, filling up two boxes. Piecing them together took an assistant several months of tedious labor.

  Adam Hermann, then chief preparator at the Museum, remounted the skeleton. One of the trickier questions he was faced with was to figure out exactly how the shoulder and backbones articulated, which would indicate how tall the beast had been. Hermann solved the problem by riding an elephant all day at the zoo while feeling its bones and taking notes. His notes led him to calculate that the mastodon was nine feet two inches high at the shoulder and fourteen feet eleven inches from skull to tail. He posed the skeleton in a walking posture, head held high, a reminder of the days not so long past when mastodons roamed the Hudson highlands.

  The procession of probiscidians in the hall illustrates the evolution of these curious mammals, and especially the changing shape of their large tusks, which began as enlarged, flat teeth in their lower jaw. Elephant remains have been discovered all over the world, having spread outward over the centuries from their hypothesized origin in Africa. In America they did quite well, ranging over much of the continent. There were dozens of now-extinct forms, from tiny, pig-sized elephants to the huge Imperial Mammoth. Mastodons died out in North America a scant ten thousand years ago—yesterday, by evolutionary standards. It is thought that humans may have contributed to their demise, just as we are now doing to elephants in India and Africa.

  ELEVEN

  Mammals

  While the Museum has a dozen or so extinct elephants, it possesses over one hundred living elephants (the word living is evolutionary jargon, meaning existing as opposed to extinct; the specimens themselves are hardly alive), housed in the Mammalogy Section of the Museum. It is not easy to store even one elephant, let alone one hundred. Nor is it a simple matter to find space for the half-dozen preserved gorillas, the fifteen-foot whale skull, or the hundreds of rats in jars of alcohol*36; or the giraffes, lions, platypus skins, narwhal horns, and 250,000 other specimens that constitute the Museum's mammalogy collection.

  For over eighty years mammals had been accumulating in the Museum, filling up an alcove here, an attic there, until parts of the collection became virtually unmanageable. A scientist looking for a particular bear, for example, often had to open a dozen or so fluid-filled tanks just to find it. Skeletons were separated and scattered throughout several storerooms, taking hours of detective work to link one bone to another. During the last twenty years, and especially in the last five, the department, under Guy Musser, took the matter in hand and launched an overhaul of the collection. For a year the senior technicians in the department moved tens of thousands of specimens, from elephant skulls to shrews, into newly renovated storage areas. Now, for example, if a researcher needs to locate that jar containing the mummified contents of a mastodon's stomach, or the tusks from an elephant that Teddy Roosevelt shot, it takes only a few minutes. The collection is arranged as meticulously as books in a library.

  It is indeed an overwhelming collection. Our grand tour continued with a talk with Helmut Sommer and Bill Coull, the two technicians primarily responsible for the curation. The mammals are stored in a number of rooms. They include bones, "alcoholics" (i.e., specimens preserved in alcohol), skins, trophy heads, and other odds and ends.

  We first visited the alcoholics, arranged on shelves in an immaculate storage room on the third floor of the Museum. The smaller mammals (and pieces of mammals) are in glass jars, while the larger animals inhabit a series of stainless-steel tanks. The alcoholics are arranged in taxonomic order—that is, according to their evolutionary relationships. A researcher need only know the place of a species on the phylogenetic "tree" of Mammalia in order to locate it in the collection. Not surprisingly, then, we found the most primitive mammal—the duck-billed platypus—at the farthest corner of the room, on shelf number I. A stroll down one aisle and up the next is, in a sense, a stroll through mammalian evolution. Primates, including Homo sapiens, are located in the middle (not at the other end, as one might think—Ptolemaic thinking has disappeared in evolution as well as astronomy), since that is where we fall in terms of familial relationships with our fellow mammals. At the far end are the bovines—the antelopes, cows, oxen, and so forth.*37

  The small Homo collection in Mammalogy (there is much more in Anthropology) occupies only one shelf, and includes fetuses, some of which are nearly a century old, several brain sections, and a skinned-out human foot in a rectangular glass container. None of these old specimens are thrown out, however, as one never knows when they might be useful. (As an example from another area of Museum research, several years ago high levels of mercury were detected in tuna fish. It was believed that the oceans may have been badly contaminated by mercury, and that the fish were unsafe to eat. Examination, however, of the mercury content of century-old tuna flesh in the Museum's ichthyology collection showed an equally high mercury content—indicating that it wasn't pollution but a biological characteristic of tuna.)

  The Homo collection is rarely consulted. On the shelves directly above us, on the other hand, rests an important collection of chimpanzees often consulted by researchers from around the world. Many of these specimens came from zoos as well as from early expeditions, and some of the Museum's best chimps were donated by the Barnum & Bailey Circus.
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  The bigger mammals rest in an adjacent room, soaking peacefully in huge tanks bolted shut. Sommer pointed out the highlights of the collection. "We've got a couple of tigers in there," he said, pointing at one crate, "four lions—or at least heads of lions—and some panthers. In there is a giraffe and a camel head—a big one. In this crate are the gorillas." We asked to have a look at the gorillas, and he unbolted the lid. Immediately, the fumes from about one hundred gallons of 150-proof grain alcohol filled the room. "You don't smoke around here," Sommer advised.

  The gorillas, soaking in the brown liquid, were covered by a piece of burlap. Sommer lifted it to expose the skinned and seemingly grinning face of a gorilla and an apparent confusion of dissected body parts. "Many of the big animals here have been dissected by researchers," he said. In fact, he explained, scientists prefer to examine dissected rather than whole animals in the vats because it can save them a lot of trouble if they wish to study the internal organs. Staring up at us with sightless eyes was one of Carl Akeley's gorillas, from the slopes of Mt. Mikeno, as well as a lowland gorilla collected by Harry Raven, a Museum curator about whom we will hear in the next chapter. The others in the crate—and in fact most of the rare mammals—came (and still come) from zoos.

  Sommer next showed us other animals in the collection. From one shelf he brought out a jar containing the eight-inch-long fetus of a baleen whale. The next jar held the eyeball of a full-grown baleen whale, larger than a grapefruit. Nearby were elephant parts, and a jar containing the mummified remains of the contents of a mastodon stomach discovered in Ecuador. Another contained a seemingly chaotic mass of flesh, labeled GIRAFFE TONGUE AND EYE. Against a wall was the carefully dissected reproductive tract of a female walrus.

  Next door to the alcoholics is a vast room filled with thousands of hanging skins. (The really valuable skins, such as the vicunas, are locked in a separate vault.) "We've got just about everything," said Sommer, "even a rug made out of platypus skins. Can you believe that some idiot killed about forty platypuses just to make it?"

  Even though the Museum accepts only scientifically useful material, the walls of some of the storage rooms are covered with trophy heads. "Scientists come in and measure them," Sommer said.

  Next, Sommer led us up through a labyrinth of stairs to an attic room under a Museum roof, illuminated by skylights—the incomparable Elephant Room. Arranged meticulously on a tier of metal shelves are dozens of giant elephant skulls. Nearby, a second group of shelves houses the bones. The room is spotless, and all the bones are covered with plastic sheets. Along one wall are drawers of various smaller elephant bones: several dozen ten-pound teeth, an Adam's apple, and Jumbo's sesamoid bones, which were too small to include in its mount. A bound folder lists all the specimens and where they came from. Up here are elephants shot by Theodore and Kermit Roosevelt, Carl Akeley, and Martin and Osa Johnson; gifts from P. T. Barnum and the Barnum & Bailey circus; one from former New York Mayor John Lindsey (given to him by the president of Chad); and a dozen or more from zoos. Each elephant is represented by a half-ton or so of bones, many with two-hundred-pound skulls. "Moving these elephants," Sommer said, "was no joke."

  None of the skulls have tusks; those are stored in the Tusk Vault, where they are safe from robbery. This secret vault—a tiny room with a green steel door—is so carefully hidden within the Museum that few Museum employees even know of its existence. In this dim room, tusks are laid out in neat rows on shelves from floor to ceiling. Some of the tusks have been grotesquely mounted on stuffed elephant feet (the donations of early elephant hunters), but most are simple tusks, polished with use and slightly yellowed with age. One set, from a circus elephant, sports a ball at each tip, while several others have freakish congenital deformations. On a top shelf lies an even more valuable kind of ivory: a dozen or so narwhal horns. Each tusk has been numbered to correspond to the rest of the skeleton, stored elsewhere in the Museum.

  Along the same corridor with the Tusk Vault are other bone rooms—the hippo room, a room full of pig skeletons, and many more. Taken together, these collections constitute a gold mine of information for comparative anatomists, evolutionary biologists, and systematic zoologists, who make this one of the most heavily used and researched collections in the world.

  This is not to say that everything in the Mammalogy Department is dead. For a number of years the department was home to a family of ferrets. Two of these small, weasel-like creatures, a male and an albino female, were given to the Museum for the collection. But the tannery technician certainly didn't want to kill them, so he adopted them as pets instead. The two animals had several litters before they died, and one of their offspring, named Jeb, became a Museum favorite. He had the run of the place and even learned to ride the elevator from floor to floor. One day he met with misfortune. Impatient to board the elevator, he missed his footing and fell down the elevator shaft.*38

  During the Museum's history, many curators have kept various exotic animals in the Museum, especially, it seems, insects (which we will deal with later).†39 The best-remembered pet in the history of the Museum, however, was a chimpanzee owned by a curator in the 1930s.

  MESHIE MUNGKUT

  In the far corner of the Museum's Hall of Primates, a mounted chimpanzee is shown sitting on a plaster log, its chin cupped pensively in its hand. The label identifies the anonymous animal merely as Chimpansee troglodytes,††40 with a catalog number of 148201. The label makes no further mention of this animal or of its short life on earth, and most visitors to the Museum hurry past without a second glance. But let us remain for a moment.

  Over half a century ago, the Museum sent a small field party to Africa to make zoological collections, particularly of lowland gorillas. The expedition included one man, Harry Raven, who was a curator in the Anatomy Department at the Museum. In February 1930, Raven was established in a temporary field camp in the great forest of the French Cameroons. He had just finished lunch when two Africans emerged from the bush, carrying a baby female chimpanzee. They explained that they had shot the mother for food, with a poisoned dart, and that when they had retrieved the body they found the terrified infant clinging to the dead mother's fur. They had kept the chimp for about a month as a pet, and they wanted to know if Raven would like to buy it.

  "I approached the man," Raven later recalled, "and put out my arms. The little animal looked at me a moment, then stretched her arms toward me and I took her. She grasped me tightly as if she feared she might fall. She looked at me curiously and stroked the hair on my bare arm."

  Raven was greatly taken with the animal, and bought her after a long negotiation over the price. Raven carried the chimp with him for more than two thousand miles through the jungle, putting one of his African assistants, a little boy, in charge of the animal. When Raven finally returned to his main camp at Djaposten, the chimp had the run of the town, and she became very popular among the African children. Raven had initially been worried that the many hungry dogs roaming the town would find the tiny chimp a delicious meal, but he soon discovered that the dogs seemed to regard the chimp as just another annoying human child: "If she pulled their ears or their tails or their legs," Raven wrote, "they would simply whine and walk away." The chimp exploited her advantage: the African dogs were very fond of bananas, and if the chimp saw a dog eating a banana she would rush the poor animal, making a loud noise. Usually the dog would flee with its tail between its legs. The local children began calling the chimp "Meshie Mungkut," which translates loosely as "little chimpanzee who fluffs her hair up to look big."

  When Raven fmished his work in Africa, he decided to bring Meshie back to the States with him on board a steamship. This was the unwitting beginning of a new experiment—raising a chimpanzee as a human child in a family. It wasn't a scientific, or even a deliberate, experiment, and Raven could not foresee the inevitable—and ultimately tragic—result of his decision.