Discovering the Mammoth

by John J. McKay

  Blumenbach wrote about classifying the position of fossils after he returned from the Swiss trip during which he had tracked down the bones of the Lucerne giant, which had been examined by Felix Plater in 1584. His interest in biological categorization was apparent from the beginning of his career. His medical thesis at the University of Göttingen in 1775 was about defining subspecies of humans according to Linnean principles. Later, scientific racists would use his work in ways he never intended. He divided fossils into three simple categories: known, dubious, and definitely unknown. Blumenbach gave examples for each category of samples he had seen during his trip ro Switzerland. He had hinted at this idea in the first (1780) edition of his popular text Handbuch der Naturgeschichte (Handbook of Natural History). By the beginning of the 1790s, he laid out his categories and gave specific examples for each in new editions. In the dubious category, he named the cave bear, Irish elk, mammoth, and woolly rhinoceros. For a definitely unknown animal, he suggested the animal of the Ohio valley. In the tenth edition of the Handbuch (1799) he gave each of the animals a Linnaean binomial name. The mammoth was now Elephas primigenius, the primeval or original elephant. Blumenbach’s decision to name the species as distinct from the elephants of Africa or India was a major landmark on the path to accepting extinction, but it is also a bit peculiar in the given context. The dubious category was meant to be a holding pen for fossils awaiting categorization into known or unknown. In in putting forth tentative names, he may have been laying claim to naming rights should the fossils be proven to be new species. Recent events in France could easily have encouraged him to want to act fast.

  Less than a year after Buffon’s death, a series of actions aimed at relieving a financial crisis snowballed to become the French Revolution of 1789. As revolutions are inclined to do, this one grabbed the old institutions by the neck, gave them a good shaking, and reconstituted them in a new way. State-sponsored science was no exception. In Paris, the various royal collections were combined and reorganized into the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle and placed under the leadership of a new generation of thinkers. The academy didn’t fare as well. The museum was created in more moderate days after the French Republic was declared. By the time the ruling convention turned its attention toward the academy, the revolution had entered its most radical phase and the Terror was just weeks away. The academy was abolished and nothing was created to replace it. Many of the savants safely returned to their homes and waited events out, but others were not so lucky, including the chemistry pioneer Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, who went to the guillotine.

  By the summer of 1795, the Terror was over and Paris had become relatively safe again. The surviving academicians returned to the capital, and with them came a cohort of ambitious younger thinkers. When a young man named Georges Cuvier arrived in Paris, he headed directly to the museum to seek employment and was promptly hired. Cuvier (born Jean-Léopold-Nicolas-Frédéric Cuvier) was born in a French Protestant enclave in Wurttemberg. He showed an early interest in geology and biology; he had read all of Buffon’s Natural History before he was twelve. Though his fluency in German was an additional asset, there were no jobs available for young man of his talents near his family, but there were always jobs for tutors with the rich and noble in France. He was lucky to find employment with a relatively unimportant noble family on the coast of Normandy, where he quietly waited out the Terror while examining the local geology and bringing his geological ideas into clearer focus.

  At the museum, he was assigned to be the assistant to Jean-Claude Mertrud, the professor of animal anatomy. Cuvier was at first inclined to specialize in marine invertebrate anatomy, but a victory by the revolutionary army led him in the opposite direction to large land vertebrates. At the beginning of the year, France liberated/conquered the Netherlands. As part of the spoils of war, they seized the Stadtholder’s collection—the equivalent of the royal collections of the British Museum—and sent it to the museum. The new specimens included a wealth of fossils and skeletal remains as well as two live elephants. As Cuvier and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, another rising star, worked on cataloging the new treasures, they became excited by the many and varied rhinoceros and elephant samples they had to work with. The two published a short paper on rhinoceros species that dealt only with the samples at hand and did not mention Pallas’s Siberian rhinos. In January 1796, Cuvier was elected to membership in the Institut de France, the successor of the academy. Four months later, he made a public presentation of part of his research. It was a paper about elephants.

  The published version of “Mémoires sur les espèces d’éléphants vivants et fossiles” (Memoire on living and fossil species of elephants) is only six pages long. The first page carries a note that this is the abstract of a longer paper that will be published by the institute at a later date. His main argument is that there are three species of elephants, not one as is usually supposed. From the shape of the teeth, he says that the elephants of Ceylon and of South Africa and the Siberian mammoth must be three distinct species. He goes on to say that the Ohio animal differs even more from the three elephant species than they do from each other. He concludes with a short research program: investigate what kind of revolutions in the could have removed mammoths and other missing species. He explicitly rejects Buffon’s cooling earth. As examples of other missing species, he gives Blumenbach’s list (the Handbuch was well enough known that he must have read it). He adds one more animal: “the skeleton which has just been found in Paraguay.”

  In many ways, the skeleton from Paraguay was even more amazing than the animal of the Ohio. As Cuvier and Geoffroy were sorting their way through rhinoceros and elephant bones, a packet containing a large drawing of an unknown skeleton and some brief notes about it arrived at the museum. The drawings had been sent by Philippe Rose Roume, a diplomat passing through Madrid on his way to oversee the transfer of Santo Domingo (the modern Dominican Republic) to French control. While in Madrid, Roume visited the royal natural history collection, which had just been transformed into a public museum. There he saw the reassembled skeleton of a rhino-sized animal that resembled no animal he was familiar with. He learned that the display was the work of Juan Bautista Bru de Ramón, the chief artist and taxidermist of the Spanish Academy. Bru explained that the bones had been excavated near the village of Luján in Spanish Argentina by a Dominican friar named Manuel de Torres in 1787. Bru had almost all of the bones. The only missing bones that he wasn’t able to reconstruct from the equivalent bones on the other side of the body were those of the tail. He chose not to speculate about the length of it in his mounting. He had already prepared a large profile of the skeleton. Roume had a copy made and sent it to Paris with some notes from Bru.

  Cuvier dropped everything and rushed a short paper about Bru’s animal into press. Not having access to the actual bones and having only the most basic information about the circumstances of the discovery, he contented himself with commenting on the illustration. First, he assures his readers that he has no reason to doubt the accuracy of any part of Bru’s reconstruction. Next, he points of those features that he feels are most important in identifying the animal. Cuvier had very firm opinions on the correct way to conduct comparative anatomy. The body of his paper is a lesson in his method. The broader grouping in which he placed the animal was one he called the unguiculates, a family that included armadillos, anteaters, aardvarks, pangolins, and sloths. The defining characteristic of this group are large claws on their forelegs used for digging. He walks his readers through the process of determining the relative importance of certain features and eliminating different species and genera until only the humble sloth remains. He recognizes that the size and robustness of the animal are enough to earn it its own genus next to the much smaller surviving sloths. He gives the new genus the unimaginative name of Megatherium, or huge beast.

  Modern readers might want to grow indignant on behalf of Bru, whose patient and thoughtful work was appropriated by someone hal
f his age, scooping his announcement and claiming naming rights (I originally did). Bru didn’t look at it that way. He was working on his own detailed monograph and was happy to have his, frankly, more prestigious French peers give him some publicity. When he finally published his paper, he included a Spanish translation of Cuvier’s article. When Cuvier later wrote more extensively about the Megatherium, he included a French translation of Bru’s descriptions.

  By the time Cuvier got around to writing the longer version of his elephant paper for the institute’s journal, he had collected a substantial amount of new information that needed to be added. This time he not only refers to his own observations of the museum’s specimens, he also delves deep into the literature of the previous century. At various times, he makes reference to Tentzel, Messerschmidt, Gmelin, Daubenton, Pallas, and Camper. He cites the last three as his predecessors in practicing the right kind of comparative anatomy. This is very gracious in the case of Daubenton, since, in the topic at hand, he disagreed with many of his conclusions, in particular, the number of elephant species and the identity of the Ohio animal. Pallas is the respected elder whose work he cites the most often. This makes sense because the Kunstkamera contained many fossil types that weren’t available to Cuvier but were extensively studied by Pallas. But, for mammoths, Messerschmidt (who he spelled Messer-Schmid) was the most valuable. Despite collecting for more than a century and looting collections across Europe, the museum still did not own a mammoth skull. Cuvier made his determinations about the mammoth based on Messerschmidt’s drawings as published in the Philosophical Transactions sixty years earlier. To trust another’s artwork was high praise coming from him. He was an excellent anatomical artist and highly critical of others. When he said he had no reason to distrust the accuracy of Bru’s drawings, he was giving a high compliment. Of the Ohio animal, he repeats his previous conclusions that it is a distinct species but close enough related to elephants that it belongs in the same genus. He gives both animals Linnaean names. The mammoth he calls Elephas mammonteus. The Ohio animal he calls Elephas americanus. When listing other unknown species, he asks the uncomfortable question: “Why do we find the remains of so many unknown species?” He answers his own question by saying they were all destroyed by ancient cataclysms, “revolutions on the surface of the Earth.” It is an unambiguous and unqualified endorsement of extinction. The uncompromising nature of his assertion and his own growing prestige made it a claim to which attention needed to be paid.

  The rules of the institute did not permit Cuvier to make any changes in his paper after it was read at an open meeting. In the months that passed between his reading and the publication of the next edition of their journal, Cuvier acquired additional relevant and important information. His first burst of short papers had made him something of a scientific celebrity. Savants all over the continent began corresponding with him, sending notes of their discoveries and suggesting collaborations. During that short time, he had received a copy of Blumenbach’s Handbuch and notification of no fewer than four other unknown species related to elephants. One (or possibly two) of those species he placed into the genus Elephas. These were represented by teeth found in Europe and South America. The European teeth were the source of the pseudo-turquoise found near Simore that Réaumur had investigated almost a century earlier. The South America teeth had been sent to him by the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt from Venezuela. He placed two more species in the pachyderm family, but in a different, not yet determined, genus than Elephas. The final unknown, he said, belongs somewhere between the pachyderm family and other ruminants. He reported this news in an addendum to his paper and promised a more detailed paper at a later date.

  The evidence of extinct species continued to pile up. In 1801, the institute published a plea to the international community, written by Cuvier, for a major effort to discover and identify extinct species. In the five short years since he suggested that the mammoth and the Ohio animal might be extinct, he had identified twenty-three species that he proclaimed were definitely extinct. Along with the three elephant species, he now added the German cave bear, the Irish elk, the Siberian rhinoceros, the megatherium, some large fossil turtles, a large crocodile-like animal discovered in the Netherlands, and a small flying lizard that he named pterodactyle. For his part, he planned to start his search for extinct species in the region immediately surrounding Paris. This had three distinct advantages: it would have instant appeal to potential audiences, it was relatively unworked terrain, and most of the heavy labor could be done in gypsum quarries. Over the next ten years, he published a regular stream of papers in which he identified more extinct species and entire genera. In 1812, he gathered them all together in a volume titled Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles de quadrupèdes (Researches into the bones of fossil quadrupeds). In an article written in 1806, and included in the collection, he identified five species with the same cusped teeth as the Ohio animal. He had now seen enough bones to feel safe in creating a separate genre for these fossils. He called it Mastodonte. The conical cusps reminded him of a woman’s breasts, so he created a compound word using two Greek roots: mastos, meaning breast, and dont, meaning tooth. In a letter to Charles Willson Peale, Thomas Jefferson translated it as “bubby toothed.”

  Cuvier was by no means the first to claim an animal was extinct, but he was the most assertive. Beginning in the 1760s, Collinson, d’Holbach, and others had suggested it for mammoths and mastodons. Bumenbach’s “unknown” category left open the possibility that certain fossils might represent species that no longer exist. But Cuvier’s lists raised extinction from the realm of anecdotes about one species or another as isolated incidents into the realm of a principle of nature. From time to time, entire assemblages of life vanished and were replaced by new ones. His catastrophes or revolutions accounted for the disappearances. He was never clear about how the new species came into being. He did not believe in multiple divine creations nor did he accept transformationist (evolutionary) solutions. It just happened. Cuvier’s argument for extinction began with the Megatherium and the missing elephants. There was not enough room in the world for such large, unusual animals to go unnoticed. But there was so much more to know about them than that they were gone. His own methods of comparative anatomy made it possible to deduce some facts, such as diet and locomotion. More than bones would be needed to tell the rest of the story.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE FIRST GREAT MAMMOTH

  The most important mammoth discovery of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came about because of a diplomatic failure, two strangers meeting in a frontier town, and an Evenk tribesman beachcombing during the short break between the fishing season and the reindeer hunting season. Great discoveries are frequently the result of hard work, of someone with the right training who knows what they are looking for and who looks in the right place. Other discoveries are the result of plain dumb luck, of a singular course of events that puts the right person in the right place at the right time. The recovery of what would eventually become know as the Adams mammoth is one of the latter. But, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s take things in the order they that happened.

  Ossip Shumachov was a chief of the Batouline clan of the Evenki, a Tungusic people who occupied a huge but sparsely populated swath of Siberia from the Yenissei River to the Pacific and from Manchuria to the Arctic Ocean. They shared the center of this territory with the Yakuts (Sakha), from whom the Evenki of the south learned horse herding. Above them lived the forest Evenki, nomadic hunters and trappers who lived a solitary life in the forests, rarely gathering in groups larger than an extended family. The Batouline lived in the far north. The land they called home was productive enough that they lived in cabins in a small village called Kumak Surka, the northernmost permanent settlement on the Lena River. Above them, there was nothing but seasonal hunting and fishing camps. They hunted wild reindeer, fished the river, and owned domesticated reindeer. Like all people of the north, they trapped durin
g the winter in order to have a commodity to trade with visiting Russian merchants in exchange for metal tools, powder and shot for their muskets, tobacco, and luxury items such as colored fabrics. Living on riverbanks and near the ocean shore as they did, they also hunted for ivory.

  In the summer of 1799, after the main salmon run in the Lena had ended, Shumachov and most of the Batouline moved to the Bykovski Peninsula on the coast of the Arctic Ocean. They frequently visited the peninsula during the summer, as it was the calving ground for their reindeer herd. At the end of the summer, this same peninsula was also where they conducted the wild reindeer hunt. The hunt involved driving the migrating, wild reindeer into fenced areas where they could easily be killed. After building the teepee-like huts that served as their temporary homes, the Batouline repaired the fences and waited for the herds to pass by on their way to winter pastures on the Lena Delta. While on the peninsula, they ate fresh local foods, berries, and saltwater fish, rather than the dried fish that they had stored for winter. The saltwater fish they caught were considered something of a treat. If they had some spare time, while waiting for the reindeer, Shumachov and his brothers scoured the beaches for ivory or anything else of value that might have washed up.

  It was probably during a fishing trip that Shumachov made his discovery. He was paddling his kayak-like canoe along the seaward side of the peninsula, below a hill called Kembisagashaeta, when he noticed a dark mass just beginning to be exposed near the top of the frozen bluff. He went ashore and climbed up on a rock to get a better view of it, but could not tell what it was except to say that it was not like the driftwood that he sometimes found embedded in the permafrost near the sea. With more important things to do during the remainder of the short summer, he did not spend any more time investigating the mass.