The Legacy of the Mastondon, Keith Thomson

The Legacy of the Mastondon, Keith Thomson

This is a marvelous history with more characters, conflict, tensions, and twists than many novels, yet it is true.  It is the story of our reaction to the bones of ancient eras that test our sense of time and place.  It begins with one of the early conflicts between religion and science in the US.  Obviously the conflicts with religion in Europe already included the shift from flat to round earth, from an Earth centered solar system to a Sun centered system, the questions of whether races other than Caucasians were humans, if the wolf was the devil…

  But in the US it centered around Thomas Jefferson wanted to have the skeletons of gigantic and powerful animals to show the French and especially Buffon that America was such a vital and strong continent – not one where the animals were small and deformed because of the miasma of the continental swamps.  So when the Mastodon skeletons began to be discovered, Tom was excited as was the burgeoning scientific community that had its own competition with Europe.

Exhuming the First American Mastodon"  1806-1808  Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827)

Down in the pit, workmen are digging marl and hoisting it to ground level to be sifted for fossils. To deal with the continuous seepage into the pit, Peale constructed a special pumping system. It is a continuous conveyor belt of water buckets powered by a large turnspit, propelled by three men walking forward, in step, inside it . The water is conveyed off-site through a trough.

http://www.lewis-clark.org/content/content-article.asp?ArticleID=2757

The mastodons and other fossils started a fever of collecting and exhibits that gave us people like Charles Wilson Peale, but this also created the schism and theological debate on life on Earth.  These could not represent extinction, according to religious thinking, because they would imply that god was not perfect.  So lots of ideas had to be floated – literally.  The bones were carried by Noah’s flood or better yet the animals all lived in South America and were there to provide Edgar Rice Burroughs with material for his book – The Lost Continent (probably not true, but it did work out that way).

But it was the next generation of paleontologists that give us the most vivid story.  It is the story of Leidy, Hayden, Marsh and Cope plus a lot of lesser known people who probably deserve more prestige.  But even Leidy and Hayden were pushed off the playing field by the controversy between Marsh and Cope who battled for preeminence, for Yale versus Harvard, and for the right to be right.

Marsh used politics and money to battle Cope in the field for the rights to collect, in the scientific establishment for the rights of naming and displaying.  Marsh ran over his assistants and his competitors but played politics and used them to strengthen his position.  He was not a bad scientist, just a rather bad man.

But the competition and the give and take that sent teams gathering bones in the middle of the western Indian wars, along the routes of expanding railroads, and across the Great Plains and badlands also opened up science as nothing else could.  And in the end the US took a leading role on the national stage.