Dinosaurs in the Attic (26 page)

In 1882, Phineas T. Barnum quietly approached the director of the London Zoo and offered him $10,000 for the elephant, a staggering sum for the time. When the deal was legally concluded and "securely buttoned up" in Barnum's vest pocket, news of the sale leaked out. The British public reacted instantaneously and furiously; the sale was denounced across the country. Barnum fanned the fires of controversy by making various provocative statements, which resulted in his public damnation by the Prince of Wales. The publicity was invaluable, and by the time Jumbo arrived in the States he was already a household name. Wherever the Barnum, Bailey & Hutchinson Circus went, Jumbo drew huge crowds. Barnum was to claim that more than one million American children rode on his back.
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Jumbo was cut down at the height of his fame. On September 15, 1885, the circus animals were being loaded on a train at the railroad yards of St. Thomas, Ontario. To allow the large animals to cross the tracks and board the train, a section of railside fence had been taken down. Jumbo and a baby elephant named Tom Thumb had just been brought alongside the cars when an express freight train came thundering toward them along the other set of tracks. Scott, the keeper, scrambled out of the way and screamed to Jumbo to run. With his trunk high in the air, the alarmed elephant charged down the track away from the train, but in his panic he ran past the gap in the fence. When Jumbo realized his mistake he wheeled about, galloping back along the tracks toward the opening. The train first struck Tom Thumb and knocked him, hurt but alive, down an embankment. Then it struck Jumbo head-on. The collision killed Jumbo instantly and derailed the train.

Barnum suddenly had to face the loss of his most profitable attraction. Drawing on his remarkable resources, he immediately began shamelessly concocting stories about Jumbo that would ensure the elephant's (and Barnum's) place on the front pages everywhere. In one account of Jumbo's death, he wrote, "Jumbo sacrificed his life to save that of Tom Thumb, a pigmy elephant. [He] had snatched the little elephant from in front of the thundering train and hurled the little fellow twenty yards to safety." Sure enough, Barnum struck gold again, and the front pages of newspapers all over the world poured out column-inches of heartrending copy that repeated many of Barnum's apocryphal stories.

Scientifically speaking, Jumbo was an important animal. When he attained .record size, zoologists believed that he represented a new species of elephant, and accordingly, though still alive, he was designated the type specimen for his species. After his death, it was imperative that zoologists be able to dissect the animal and obtain its skeleton for future study.
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Jumbo's carcass was therefore immediately removed to Henry Ward's Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, New York, for dissection, mounting, and stuffing. A man named Peters performed the "inside work," climbing into the elephant's body cavity and dissecting various organs. One witness described poor Peters as emerging from the mess every few minutes "looking a little white around the gills." (Transportation was slower in those days, and Jumbo had started to decompose.) When Peters sliced open the stomach, out spilled a "hatful" of English pennies, a half-crown, several rivets, a bunch of keys, and a bobby's whistle. The hide weighed 1,538 pounds and the bones 2,400 pounds. Although the entire elephant was never weighed, he was estimated at about six tons.

Barnum gave Ward strict instructions concerning the stuffing of Jumbo. "By all means," he wrote, "make him show like a mountain." Carl Akeley did a fine job of increasing the animal's height in death by about a foot. He also repaired the shattered skull and mounted the bones.

Barnum, determined to squeeze every ounce of publicity out of the elephant, planned a gala for the unveiling of the stuffed elephant and its mounted bones. He invited a crowd of reporters and high-society ladies to a fancy hotel. During a series of flowery speeches, Barnum served his guests a gelatia dish made from a pound and a half of Jumbo's finely ground tusks.

Jumbo's remains traveled with Barnum's circus for several years; he eventually gave the stuffed skin to Tufts, where he was a trustee, and the scientifically important bones to the Museum. When Jumbo was taken off exhibition, his aged and crumbling skeleton was wrapped in a plastic shroud and stored in the bowels of the Museum. Just a few years ago the Mammalogy Department refurbished the skeleton, repaired its mounts, and moved it into the same corridor as the Chubb horses. Now Jumbo brings up the rear of a parade of skeletons along the hall, a silent memorial to one of the most famous animals of all time.

THE WARREN MASTODON

Another sort of elephant parade can be seen in the Museum's Hall of Late Mammals. (By "late," the Museum means recently extinct, not deceased.) Four mastodons and mammoths parade single-file down the center of the hall, frozen in taxonomic sequence. The most famous of the quartet is the Warren Mastodon, second in line, named after the scientist who acquired it for his personal collection. One of the most complete mastodons known, it is the remains of a beast that wandered along the shores of the Hudson River perhaps ten or twenty thousand years ago. The hapless animal came to an untimely end in what is now Orange County, New York, by venturing too far into a boggy patch of peat moss.

The discovery of this venerable skeleton dates from before the Civil War. The summer of 1845 was dry and hot in upstate New York, and a number of shallow ponds and bogs had dried up. The local farmers began digging up some of these bogs, since the peat and marl they contained made excellent fertilizer for their fields. One of these farmers was Nathaniel Brewster of East Coldenham, New York, who hired a gang of workmen to cut the peat out of one bog and spread it on his fields. The men had dug about three feet into the soft peat when one of them struck something hard. Further digging exposed a four-foot-long skull with a pair of gracefully curving, almost flawless ivory tusks.

Not knowing what to do, Brewster called the local doctor, a man named Prime, who lived in the nearby town of Newburgh. Dr. Prime sped down to the Brewster farm in his carriage to supervise the excavation. As the workmen dug, they gradually brought to light a beautifully preserved skeleton of a mastodon, standing upright just as it had sunk in the mire hundreds of centuries before. The skeleton's position gave an indication of the animal's last terrifying moments as it sank into the bog. Its legs were thrust forward and slightly apart, and its skull was tilted upward as if straining for the last breath of air.

While most mastodon bones turn black with age, these bones were remarkably well preserved and only lightly stained. One paleontologist described them as "beautiful" and the color of "old human bones." Although the animal's flesh had decayed and vanished, the contents of its stomach remained.

Dr. Prime later described the discovery of the mastodon's last meal:

In the midst of the ribs, embedded in the marl and unmixed with shells or carbonate of lime, was a mass of matter, composed principally of the twigs of trees broken into pieces about two inches in length, and varying in size from very small twigs to half an inch in diameter. There was mixed in with these a large quantity of finer vegetable substance, like finely divided leaves; the whole amounting to from four to six bushels. From the appearance of this, and its situation, it was supposed to be the contents of the stomach; and this opinion was confirmed on removing the pelvis, underneath which, in the direction of the last of the intestines, was a train of the same material, about three feet in length [and] four inches in diameter.

When the beast was finally exhumed, Prime had the bones carried to Brewster's barn. During the weeks that followed, neighbors came to watch the enthusiastic doctor carefully fitting and wiring the bones together in the gloom of the barn. In classic nineteenth-century style the mounted bones went on tour, stopping at various small towns in New England and upstate New York, where it drew crowds of amazed viewers. (Unfortunately, the original tusks had crumbled to pieces upon drying out, and the mastodon had had to be fitted with a pair of fakes.)

By this time, New York State had already yielded a number of mastodon fossils. As early as 1705, according to an article by Henry Fairfield Osborn, Governor Dudley of New York mentioned in a letter to Cotton Mather that several mastodon bones and teeth had been found near Albany. In 1782 the first mastodon bones found in Orange County were unearthed on a farm outside Newburgh. (George Washington even made a special trip to see these bones during his sojourn at Newburgh in the winter of 1782-83.) In 1802 a complete mastodon skeleton came to light on John Masten's farm near Newburgh. It was excavated by Charles Willson Peale and his sons, Rembrandt and Titian.
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The Warren Mastodon was the fifth complete probiscidian found in Orange County, and the locals were proud of their mastodon heritage.
An Outline History of Orange County,
by Samuel W. Eager (published the year after the Warren Mastodon was found), contained a section on mastodons. The subject strained the author's somewhat limited literary gifts, but it provides a fascinating pre-Darwinian view of paleontology:

We cannot, without disrespect to the memory of a lost but giant race, and slighting the widespread reputation of old Orange as the mother of the most perfect and magnificent specimens of terrestrial animals, omit to tell of the mastodon. Contemplating his remains as exhumed from their resting place for unknown ages, we instinctively think of his great and lordly mastery over the beast—of his majestic tread as he strode these valleys and hilltops—of his anger when excited to fury—stamping the earth till trembling beneath his feet-snuffing the wind with disdain, and uttering his wrath in tones of thunder,—and the mind quails beneath the oppressive grandeur of the thought, and we feel as if driven along by the violence of a tornado. When the pressure of contemplation has subsided and we recover from the blast, we move along and ponder on the time when the mastodon lived,—when and how he died, and the nature of the catastrophe that extinguished the race; and the mind again becomes bewildered. Were they pre-Adamites, and did they graze upon the fields of Orange and bask in the sunlight of that early period of the globe?—or were they antediluvian, and carried to a common grave by the deluge of the Scriptures?—or were they postdiluvian only, and till very recent periods wandered over our hills and fed in these valleys.

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.
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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.