Discovering The Great Claw:
Part 1 - The Giant Cat
In March of 1797, Jefferson arrived in Philadelphia to attend the inauguration of John Adams as president and himself as vice president. However, his heart and mind may very well been more invested in a talk he would soon give at the American Philosophical Society. He had just been elected president of the society and almost certainly preferred the company of its members to the cabinet of his political rival, Mr. Adams (1).
The subject of Jefferson' s talk before the society was a collection of remarkable bones he received from a cave in what is now West Virginia. The bones were discovered while workmen were mining saltpeter (sodium nitrate) from the cave floor. Many of the bones had been taken by locals as souvenirs, but a few of them were salvaged by John Stewart and sent to his friend at Monticello.
At the talk on March 10, Jefferson described the bones, which consisted of a fragment of the upper arm, the two bones of the lower arm and parts of the hand. Menacing claws at the end of each finger, prompting Jefferson to name the animal "Megalonyx" or "Great-Claw". He concluded that these fossils belonged to a large cat such as a lion or tiger. But they were too large to belong to any known cat. Using the anatomical account of the African lion by the French anatomist Daubenton for comparison, Jefferson estimated that the Megalonyx weighed more than three times the weight of the lion. He concluded:
"Let us say then, what we may safely say, that he was more than three times as large as the lion: that he stood as pre-eminently at the head of the column of clawed animals as the mammoth stood at that of the elephant, rhinoceros and hippopotamus: and than he may have been as formidable an antagonist to the mammoth as the lion to the elephant."
Although the Comte de Buffon had been dead for almost a decade, Jefferson was apparently still bothered by his theory of American Degeneracy (2). The possibility of a giant cat that dwarfed the Old World lion combined with a "Mammoth" (American mastodon) that dwarfed the Old World elephant may have proved irresistible in his longstanding effort to discredit the theory.
Later in his presentation Jefferson argued that the Megalonyx, as well as the "Mammoth" were probably still alive. A couple of his arguments were anecdotal: he related a few accounts of woodsmen being terrorized by a large cat-like animal and a report on a Native American rock drawing that resembles a cat. Three other arguments, however, were more substantial. The first is the philosophical objection that extinction belies the perfection of the Creation (3). The second is that these giant predators would have to be very rare and thus unlikely to have been familiar. Otherwise. they would "have ultimately extinguished after eating out their pasture." The third argument states that the vastness of wilderness of North America cast doubts on any claim that the animal was extinct:
"In the present interior of our continent there is surely space and range enough for elephants and lions, if in that climate they could subsist; and for the mammoth and megalonyxes who may subsist there. Our entire ignorance of the immense country to the West and North-West, and of its contents, does not authorise us so say what is does not contain."
Next: Part 2 - The Ground Sloth
Webpages:
- American Philosophical Society:
www.amphilsoc.org
Print Resources:
- Bedini, S.A. 1985. "Thomas Jefferson and American Vertebrate Paleontology." Virginia Division of Mineral Resources Publication 61. Charlottesville. 26 pp.
- Jefferson, Thomas. 1799. "A Memoir of the Discovery of certain Bone of a Quadruped of the Clawed Kind in the Western Parts of Virginia." Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 4, No. 30, pp. 246-260.
- Semonin, P. 2002. American Monster: How the nation's first prehistoric creature became a symbol of national identity. New York & London: New York University Press.
Notes:
- President John Adams was a personal friend of Thomas Jefferson, but ideological differences and party politics soon drove a wedge between the two. Adams was a Federalist, although he was considerably more moderate than most of his cabinet. Jefferson, who helped found the Democratic-Republican party, was Adams' opponent during the hotly contested 1796 election. The spirit at the inauguration was bipartisan and conciliatory, but Jefferson was soon excluded from any real participation in the administration. [go back]
- Comte de Buffon was the most influential naturalist of the 18th century. In 1766, he published his Theory of American Degeneracy, which stated that an adverse climate in the New World inhibited the development of native quadrupeds (an archaic classification that includes most mammals) and resulted in the degeneration of those transplanted from the Old World. Buffon extended this effect to Native Americans and some of his disciples extended it to include transplanted Europeans as well. Naturally, these transplants took offense and challenged the theory. Thomas Jefferson was the most prominent of these critics. See American Degeneracy for more information [go back]
- Jefferson, a Deist, believed in the perfection of creation and was resistant to the idea that any animal could become extinct. See Fossils and Extinction for more information. [go back]
Image Credits:
- Wistar, Caspar. 1799. "A description of the Bones deposited by the President, in the Museum of the Society, and represented in the annexed plates." Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 4, No. 71, pp. 526-531.
(This digit is a detail of an engraving plate presented in Wistar (1799). A reproduction of the plate is presented in the Megalonyx fossil gallery.) [go back] - Thomas Jefferson, date and publisher unknown.
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [icufaw apc0005] [go back] - Godman, John D. 1826. American Natural History. Philadelphia: Carey and Lea. [go back]