Plaster parts made to look like the real thing completed the skeleton, and it is here that south Georgia enters the equation. Then he took me into the museum’s paleontological collections to see some of the “spare parts.” The giant sloth skeleton on display was actually only partly authentic, since it was constructed using skeletal remains that were incomplete. (The exhibition closed in 2014 for renovations and will reopen June 8 under the name “The David H. The Smithsonian’s Brian Huber, who at the time headed the paleobiology department, wanted my visit to begin in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History dinosaur hall, where the sloth was on view, so that I could first see a giant sloth as a completed whole. He even went so far as to advise Lewis and Clark to be on the lookout for live Megalonyx on their historic voyage of discovery.ĭonny Bajohr The Mammal Fossil in Dinosaur Hall and What We Did Not Know Although Jefferson was ahead of his time in many ways, he was among those who did not believe in Cuvier’s extinction theory. Mammoth” for spending time on his beloved fossil collection when they felt he should have been working on matters of state. Jefferson must have been proud of this distinction, but his political opponents taunted him as “Mr. It was given the formal name of Megalonyx (“large claw”), and later it was granted the type species name of jeffersonii in honor of the man who introduced it to the world. Jefferson’s specimen was smaller than the Argentinean Megatherium and from a different genus, but it was still a large sloth. That amateur paleontologist happened to be Thomas Jefferson, who was vice president of the United States at the time. It was titled “A Memoir of the Discovery of Certain Bones of an Unknown Quadruped, of the Clawed Kind, in the Western Part of Virginia.” According to Smithsonian historian Silvio Bedini, they were given to an avid amateur paleontologist who presented a paper in 1797 to the American Philosophical Society. Soon after the discovery of the Argentinean Megatherium, giant ground sloths were given an unexpected boost in popularity when a large claw and some limb bones of another one were found in the United States. Cuvier named the fossil Megatherium (“great beast”) americanum (for its home).
Many people disagreed with him, but he was eventually proved right. One of the keys to Cuvier’s identification was the animal’s big claws, which resembled those of the smaller sloths that still could be found in the tropical forests of South America. Things New and Strange is beautifully written and inspiring to read. Wayne Clough demonstrates in the most exemplary way how any American, or for that matter any citizen of the world, can use the Smithsonian Institution's increasingly digitized collections for self-discovery and find in them their own deep, personal connections to natural history, world events, and the American experience. Things New and Strange: A Southerner’s Journey through the Smithsonian Collections When he saw drawings of the newly discovered Argentinean fossil, Cuvier concluded it fit his theory and that it was a species of giant ground sloth that had gone extinct. Even though Cuvier had earned his spurs by careful work, most of his fellow scientists did not support his idea. Ĭuvier was controversial for advancing the fact that species could go extinct, some suddenly, and their existence could later be proven using fossils. It would take a contrarian to sort out the new creature, and he was a French scientist named Georges Cuvier. In fact, there had been nothing like it in Europe or Asia because these unusual animals were native to the Americas. It was big, as big as a grown elephant, and no one, including scientists, had ever seen anything like it before. Its fossilized bones were sent to the Natural History Museum of Madrid where they were assembled to show what the creature might have looked like. It turns out that nobody even knew giant ground sloths existed until a fellow named Manuel Torres found one in 1788 in Argentina. I was on a journey during which a fossilized giant ground sloth would lead me to a new understanding of myself and our world. But I would learn that connections, no matter how arcane, demanded to be followed, and the learning that resulted was part of the process. When I came up with the notion for my new book, Things New & Strange, of connecting my south Georgia home to the Smithsonian collections, I had no idea it would lead me to giant ground sloths.
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