Integrative and Comparative Biology Advance Access originally published online on July 15, 2008
Integrative and Comparative Biology 2008 48(4):540-541; doi:10.1093/icb/icn073
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Book Review |
Big Bone Lick: The Cradle of American Paleontology. Stanley Hedeen.
North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences,
Raleigh, NC 27601
Correspondence: E-mail: Dale.Russell{at}ncmail.net
Big Bone Lick: The Cradle of American Paleontology. Stanley Hedeen.
Lexington Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 2008. xviii + 182 pp., 37 illustrations. ISBN 978-0-8131-2485-8 (cloth), $24.95.
There is a marsh a few miles south of the Ohio River in northern Kentucky that is fed by warm saline and sulfurous waters, in turn derived from half-billion-year-old subterranean sources. Similar salt marshes are scattered throughout the basin of the Ohio River. In pre-Colonial times bison herds visited this marsh to slake their thirst for salt. In 1739 it was visited by a French military expedition dispatched with the objective of removing a threat to communications between Montreal and New Orleans by the Chickasaw Nation. From it they extracted a huge thigh bone, a fragment of a tusk, and three massive teeth, which were forwarded to Paris to be placed in the collection of curiosities of King Louis XV, which later became the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle. (According to G. G. Simpson (Proceedings American Philosophical Society, volume 86, 1942), elephant teeth had been identified near Charleston, South Carolina, prior to 1739, but the occurrence did not attract widespread attention). It is now difficult to comprehend reactions sparked by this seemingly minor event over the course of the following century. The discovery and ensuing saga are ably documented by Stanley Hedeen in "Big Bone Lick."
The huge incognitum, or "Ohio animal," attracted the attention of such prominent figures in the American Revolution as George Rogers Clark, Benjamin Franklin, William Henry Harrison, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington. How was it that these personages, who were fully occupied by pivotal roles they played in establishing the American nation, still had time to concern themselves with bones located far to the west of the limits of the American colonies? Joining them in their interest were French luminaries of the Enlightenment, including Georges Louis Leclerc, Compte de Buffon, Georges Cuvier, and Jean-Marie Daubenton. The teeth and bones were huge and unquestionably real, but what kind of animal did they represent? To some, the heavy "grinders" indicated carnivory; to others, browsing habits. Was it a huge hippopotamus or a distant American cousin of the Siberian mammoth? And what did the animal look like? Resolution was frustrated by the fact that the bones were scattered, and no articulated skeletons were recovered. Further, the discovery of different but elephant like teeth indicated that a second huge incognitum was represented in Big Bone Lick collections. Which bones belonged to what animal? These obstacles were overcome by Cuvier in 1806, whose reconstruction depicted a unique, elephant like animal. The incognitum thus became Mammut americanum, the American mastodon. And the second incognitum is now known as the Columbian mammoth, or Mammuthus columbi.
The giant bones were mute, but they posed philosophical alternatives, which at the time were acute and unresolved. The Creator was understood to be perfect and eternal. As a consequence, must all of creation also be perfect and therefore changeless? If the incognitum were to be found somewhere, alive, the perfection of creation would be supported. If not, then nature incorporated change, and the scope of creation would be deepened in an unprecedented manner. It would be as if the night sky were to be transformed from a vaulted surface to fields of island universes (galaxies) that diminish into cosmic dimensions of space and time. Cuvier demonstrated that no mastodon had yet been seen alive. Jefferson launched the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–1806), requesting that, in addition to its other objectives it determine whether or not living mastodons could be found in the remote outback of the Louisiana Purchase (1803). The rest is history.
Collecting has since continued at the site. However, its prominence was eclipsed by the rapid expansion of the earth sciences during the 19th and 20th centuries, which has been well chronicled elsewhere. Thus, scientists were soon to be shocked by the discovery of bones of giant reptiles. The "Age of Mastodons" was thus preceded an antediluvian "Age of Reptiles." Dinosaur bones were unearthed in Western Europe and along the Atlantic seaboard of the former British colonies in America. Later in the century, fossil collectors followed the Union Pacific Railroad (completed in 1869) through the Wild West, collecting spectacular skeletons as they went. The United States Geological Survey was established (1879) to inventory the lands of the former Louisiana Purchase. Time had bypassed the Big Bone Lick, and the dispersal and loss of historical collections made from the Lick had left no imposing monument to its former glory. Like a poetic description of the works of Ozymandias, the "birthplace of American Paleontology" and the "site that brought species extinction to the attention of the world" was all but forgotten in the beautiful wooded hills of northern Kentucky.
Ozymandius, Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818We owe a debt of gratitude to Hedeen for inviting us to revisit this special moment in the history of science. Specialists and interested amateurs will surely enjoy his book.I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'ed on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
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