Complex Numbers

Woolly Bully

As this entry is later than usual—as I vaguely remember mentioning in a note yesterday, I might have consumed an excessive amount of ethanol—I'm not going to comment too much. But it's an interesting bit of history, illustrating some of the best and worst of humanity.

The Story of Charles Willson Peale’s Massive Mastodon  
When a European intellectual snubbed the U.S., the well-known artist excavated the fierce fossil as evidence of the new Republic’s strength and power

In the 18th century, French naturalist George-Louis Leclerc, Comte du Buffon (1706-1778), published a multivolume work on natural history, Histoire naturelle, générale et particuliére. This massive treatise, which eventually grew to 44 quarto volumes, became an essential reference work for anyone interested in the study of nature...

The Comte de Buffon advanced a claim in his ninth volume, published in 1797, that greatly irked American naturalists. He argued that America was devoid of large, powerful creatures and that its human inhabitants were “feeble” by comparison to their European counterparts.

Obviously, Buffoon wasn't familiar with Sasquatch. As for "feeble," well, those "European counterparts" were busy systematically destroying the inhabitants by means of more advanced technology.

The claim infuriated Thomas Jefferson, who spent much time and effort trying to refute it—even sending Buffon a large bull moose procured at considerable cost from Vermont.

You know, this is about when, normally, I'd stop reading. Why? Because according to this article, the Comte died in 1778. The Wikipedia page claims he died in 1788 (I know there was a major calendar switch in the 18th century, but not that major). The ninth volume was, again according to this article, published in 1797, either 19 or nine years after his death. And yet Jefferson sent him a moose? To what, his mausoleum?

So, okay, something's really wonky about the dates here, and that definitely needs resolved (especially as Leclerc was a noble and the French revolution was mostly a 1790s thing).

In 1739, a French military expedition found the bones and teeth of an enormous creature along the Ohio River at Big Bone Lick in what would become the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

I'm mostly just including this quote so that those of you unfamiliar with Kentucky can have a sensible 12-year-old chuckle at "Big Bone Lick."

Of course, the local Shawnee people had long known about the presence of large bones and teeth at Big Bone Lick.

It's right there in the name, folks. What? You didn't actually think the other definition applied?

For millennia, bison, deer and elk congregated there to lick up the salt, and the indigenous people collected the salt as well. The Shawnee considered the large bones the remains of mighty great buffalos that had been killed by lightning.

This is completely tangential to the article, but I've had this working hypothesis for a while now that the reason so many cultures have dragon myths is because they'd occasionally find dinosaur bones. Having no concept of deep time, they had to make up stories about how such enormous skeletons got to be part of the landscape, and those stories became dragon legends.

I have no real support for this, but it tracks with what I know about humans.

Anyway. Not much else to say, except that the article calls out my hometown, which I always think is cool (unless it's to recall the events of 2017). The rest of the story details the process of figuring out what those bones were (spoiler: mastodon), and, like I said, is an interesting look into the history of scientific discovery.

Oh, but before I go, don't give much credence to those stories you keep finding about people trying to Jurassic-Park the mastodon back into existence. Most of them are sensationalist.