The First Paleontological Dig in the Americas

The first known Europeans in the New World to see fossils of large land animals were Hernán Cortés and his lieutenants. In the fall of 1519 they began their march inland to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. Their path over the Sierra Madre Mountains led through the territory of Tlaxcala. Tlaxcala was one of the last remaining Nahua states to remain free of Aztec rule and its leaders had no intention of letting anyone's army enter their territory. An army was sent to stop the invaders. Although the Tlaxcalans had an opportunity to destroy the Spanish force, internal politics of the state led them to accept an offer of peace from Cortés. While the Spanish rested in Tlaxcala, the leaders of the state made every effort to curry favor and impress the strangers. The Spanish were fed and entertained. The leading houses allowed their daughters to be baptized. They promised an army to aid Cortés in his assault on Tenochtitlan.

At some point during the three weeks the Spanish stayed in Tlaxcala, a group of Spaniards began to question their hosts about their history. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who wrote a history of the campaign described their answer. 

They said that their ancestors had told them, that in times past there had lived among them men and women of giant size with huge bones, and because they were very bad people of evil manners that they had fought with them and killed them, and those of them who remained died off. So that we could see how huge and tall these people had been they brought us a leg bone of one of them which was very thick and the height of a man of ordinary stature, and that was the bone from the hip to the knee. I measured myself against it and it was as tall as I am although I am of fair size.

 The Spanish helped themselves to the bone and sent it to the king on the first treasure ship. The bones of both Columbian mammoths and American mastodons have been excavated in that part of Mexico, but a bone as long as the one Díaz described probably came from an earlier mastodon species such as Rynochotherium tlascalae. In researching her book Fossil Legends of the First Americans, Adrienne Mayor went searching for this femur. Although museum officials in Spain couldn't identify that specific bone, they didn't exactly rule out its being there. The records for those years are just too sparse to be sure. It very well might be sitting, unlabeled, in a warehouse somewhere in Madrid.

Díaz wasn't the only Spaniard to report on the presence of large bones and legends of ancient giants. Cortés himself had a collection of bones at his estate. Later travelers, José de Acosta and Antonio Hererra y Tordesillas, also recorded the Tlaxcala legend and were shown giant teeth and bones. However, the most interesting report didn't come from Mexico, it came from Ecuador.

The conquest of the Inca Empire was nowhere near as easy as that of the Aztecs. For almost forty years, the Viceroyalty of Peru was plagued by civil wars and uprisings—not to mention actual plagues—among both the indigenous populations and their Spanish conquerors. In the 1540s, two very different men were thrust into the chaos. One was a soldier, Pedro Cieza de Léon, and the other a clerk, Agustin de Zárate. What they had in common was a strong sense of curiosity for the natural world. Near Quito, they both recorded the same story told by the local population. Long ago, horrible, deformed giants arrived on the Santa Elena Peninsula from across the sea. They raped and murdered the coastal people and ate all the food in the area. The people were defeated in every attempt to fight the giants, until: 

All the natives declare (wrote Cieza) that God our Lord brought upon them a punishment in proportion to the enormity of their offence. While they were all together, engaged in their accursed [sodomy] a fearful and terrible fire came down from heaven with a great noise, out of the midst of which there issued a shining angel with a glittering sword, with which, at one blow, they were all killed, and the fire consumed them. There only remained a few bones and skulls, which God allowed to remain without being consumed by the fire, as a memorial of this punishment.

 An angel destroys the Santa Elena giants in the 1700, French edition of Zárate. Source.

 Neither Cieza nor Zárate was able to go to the peninsula to see the bones. Cieza heard from enough from Spaniards who had seen giants’ bones in other parts of the Americas to accept that the story must be true, though probably exaggerated. Zárate wrote that the story seemed too fantastic to believe until he heard of another Spaniard who had been to the peninsula. 

Withal, what the Indians told about these giants was not fully believed until, in the year 1543, when the captain Juan de Olmos, a native of Trujillo, was lieutenant governor at Puerto Viejo, he caused excavations to be made in the valley, having heard of these matters. They found ribs and bones so large that, if the heads had not appeared at the same time it would not have seemed credible [i.e., that the remains were] of human beings.

What Olmos did was quite advanced for his time. He could easily have ordered the natives to bring him a few bones. Instead, he went to the place where the bones had been reported and examined them in situ. He recovered the complete bones of an individual and tried to reconstruct what it might have been based on the knowledge and worldview that he had. Europeans at the time still firmly believed in giants. The first intellectual challenges to the belief in giant wouldn't happen until the next decade. The debate over the historical reality of giants would continue well into the Enlightenment two hundred years later. That the skeleton did not perfectly match the proportions of a human skeleton wasn't a problem. Giants, by definition, were monsters. That it looked heavy-limbed and twisted was to be expected.

Both the central highlands of Mexico and Ecuador have remained rich sites for proboscidean fossils. In 1802, Alexander von Humboldt collected giant bones in Ecuador and in Mexico which he identified as resembling the elephant of the Ohio country. He also mentioned that the local people called one of the locations the Field of Giants. Humboldt sent the bones to his colleague Georges Cuvier in Paris. In an 1806 paper, in which he coined the name Mastodonte for the genus that included the Ohio animal, Cuvier determined that Humboldt’s bones represented three separate mastodon species (one of which he named M. humboldtii) and a giant ground sloth. Since then, several other proboscideans have been identified in Central and South America (the exact number is in constant flux). Some look quite different from the familiar mammoth and mastodon from further north. Some had four tusks. Some had short, almost fang-like tusks. Most paleontologists who work in the area probably don't realize that Latin America paleontology long predates its Anglo American sibling. Most don't know that the field began with a few soldiers who took time off from their wars to look at the world around them and ask questions.

Crap

I just received my first formal rejection letter on the book.

Ben's Kite

On this day in 1752, Ben Franklin decided to fly a kite...

His complete letter, as first published, is here.

Leibniz's Unicorn

Otto von Geuricke was not a fool. During his lifetime he was a philosopher, diplomat, Mayor of Magdeburg for thirty-one years, and a respected scientist and inventor. It was for his work the last two capacities that he is probably best remembered. Geuricke invented the vacuum pump and performed public experiments with it that made him a welcome member of the European scientific elite. With that resume, it might surprise modern readers to find him calmly describing a unicorn in his main scientific work before moving on to more important topics.

His description is short. In its entirety, it reads:

It happened in the year 1663 in Quidlinberg, that on the Mountain the common people call Zeunickenberg, where lime is mined, inside the rock a unicorn skeleton was found. The rear portion of the body, as is common in a beast, lay back, head up, but, extending lengthwise from the brow was a horn, the thickness of a human leg, and so in proportion to the length of almost five cubits. Primarily through ignorance, the skeleton of the animal was broken and extracted in pieces. Together with the head with the horn and some ribs, spine, and bones, were given to the Reverend head abbess of the place.

The passage gives no indication whether Geuricke ever saw the bones himself, though he had plenty of opportunity to do so. Quedlinberg is less than thirty miles from Magdeburg and much of Guricke's technical innovation was aimed at making mining safer and more efficient, so he must have visited the mining regions. However, there is nothing in his writings to indicate that he ever looked further into the story. Guericke was an important enough scientist that his books were read and discussed by the scientific elite all over Europe. The Quedlinberg unicorn was mentioned a few times over the next few years and would have been forgotten except for the fact that the great Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz repeated the story and produced a drawing of the skeleton.

In the years 1691-3, Leibniz was working on a geological history of that part of Germany as a Michener-style prologue to his history of the house of Brunswick and their lands. A large part of his work dealt with fossils. The presence of entire strata of salt water seashells on high ground disturbed and intrigued Seventeenth Century natural philosophers. Leibniz catalogued and analyzed the shells in his region. Following that, he looked at some of the other difficult organic remains buried in the mountains. Buried ivory was right at the top of the list.

Buried ivory had several names, one of the most common, at least to people who spoke Latin, was "unicornu fossili"--fossil unicorn. At that time, the word "fossil" was evolving from its original meaning of "something from the ground" into its modern meaning of "petrified organic matter." Another transformation happening at the time had to do with the word "unicorn." The belief in, and giving a damn about, the animal unicorn peaked during the Renaissance. Unicorn horn was a protection against poisons and a universal antidote should you be poisoned. No one was anyone unless someone wanted them dead. Unicorn horn’s medical powers were not limited to poison. It was also useful in treating “Scurvy, Old Ulcers, Dropsie, Running Gout, consumptions, Distillations, Coughs, Palpitation of the Heart, Fainting Fits, Convulsions, Kings Evil, Rickets in Children, Melancholly or Sadness, The Green Sickness, Obstructions, and all Distempers proceeding from a Cold Cause." Fragments of unicorn horn were worth more than their weight in gold. A complete horn was worth more than a medium sized town.

Its very success doomed the unicorn. Nothing about the unicorn could stand up to extended scrutiny. From one side, physicians questioned the idea of a universal antidote. Nature was composed of pairs of opposites, hot vs. cold, wet vs. dry. How could the same medicine counteract a wet poison and also a dry poison? Naturalists hunted the world for the unicorn animal and found hints and claims, but no actual unicorns. By the late Seventeenth Century, faith in the existence of an actual unicorn animal was fading fast. Several different writers demonstrated that the straight spiral horn, so beloved by medieval artists, actually came from a sea animal caught in the icy waters surrounding Greenland. Other pieces of unicorn horn were shown to be walrus tusks, elephant ivory, or cheaper substances such teeth and bones of farm animals. The last great hope for unicorn believers was fossil ivory. Finding ivory in the ground was pretty amazing. Guericke adhered to the belief that it actually grew there. Not that it was a plant, but that it was real ivory created by some generative power within the earth. If fossil ivory had such had such a wonderful origin, crediting it with diverse medical powers was no great stretch of the mind.

When Leibniz repeated Guericke’s story, he made it clear that, in his opinion, unicornu fossili was the remains of real animals. What’s more he was sure it was the remains of known animals. He allowed that in rare cases it might ivory of elephants washed into the North by the Biblical deluge, but he confident that in most cases it was the remains of walruses and narwhals that had lived there when the shoreline of the North Sea was far to the south of its present location. Still, Guericke was a man of impeccable reputation and the story was an interesting one. Following his recounting of the story as told by Guericke, Leibniz added: “The same has been reported to me. An illustration was added which it is not inappropriate to submit here.”

Leibniz’s unicorn. Source.

Leibniz never finished his history. In fact he never went any further than writing the geological preface. Both the text and the drawing sat in his papers until 1749, over thirty years after his death. In that year, Ludwig Scheidt, the librarian of the house of Brunswick, edited the treatise into chapters and had the drawings Leibniz had collected engraved onto printing plates. The result was published in Latin and German as Protogaea, or A Dissertation on the Original Aspect of the Earth and the Vestiges of Its Very Ancient History in the Monuments of Nature. The unicorn appeared on the same page as the tooth of a mammoth (referred to as that of a “marine animal”) and carried the caption “Image of a skeleton excavated near Quedlinberg.”

The image and description have gone on to become quite famous. While the bizarreness of the image has a lot to do with that fame, the image has a valid claim to being a significant milestone in paleontology. Science writers often call it the first paleontological reconstruction. To call it that, requires a few qualifiers. Every time a medieval parish priest laid out some large bones and imagined his village had discovered a giant, he was making a paleontological reconstruction of sorts. What made the Quedlinberg unicorn special was that published and directed at a scientifically literate audience.

But that’s not the whole story of the Quedlinberg unicorn. Over the years, both Guericke and Leibniz have been credited as the artists. Guericke is an unlikely source. His book was well illustrated and, if he found the story interesting enough to add to his book, it seems that he would have used the illustration if he had had it in his possession. Leibniz is definitely not the artist. He explicitly says he received the drawing from an unnamed person whose account backed up Guericke’s. As I mentioned above, Leibniz and Guericke was not the only writers to draw attention to the story. The most interesting publication happened in 1704, while Leibniz was still alive. In a catalog and commentary on the great collections of Europe, Michael Bernard Valentini published a version of the reconstruction. Valentini wrote that the illustration was based on a sketch by Johann Mäyern, a counselor at Quedlinberg. Valentini’s illustration is of much lower quality than Leibniz’s. Was Mäyern Leibniz’s other source or was there a third drawing that they both copied? Unless Mäyern’s original drawing shows up, we will probably never know.

Valentini’s unicorn. Source.

In the early Twentieth Century, the Austrian paleontologist Othenio Abel took an interest in the Quedlinberg unicorn. Abel had already casually mentioned the story in several of his books before he decided to get serious and try to figure out what the skeleton really was. They actual bones had long since disappeared and no other drawings or descriptions had ever been made of them. The best evidence he had to work with was Leibniz’s drawing. Abel immediately recognized that this not a single skeleton that had been reassembled in a whimsical manner. The bones came from at least two individuals and two different species. The skull is that of a woolly rhinoceros. The teeth, scapulae, and vertebrae are from a mammoth. Most of the spine has been reassembled backwards and upside down. What at first glance look like ribs are really dorsal spines that are part of the individual vertebrae. The loop at the bottom is the first cervical vertebra. And the horn; what is the horn? It’s too long to be a walrus tusk and too wide to be a narwhal tooth, Leibniz’s preferred explanation for fossil ivory. Rhinoceros horns are not made of bone or ivory. They’re made of keratin, the material as hair and finger nails. It’s unlikely that the learned burgers of Quedlinberg would have mistaken that for a unicorn horn. That leaves a mammoth tusk, which easily meets the length and width requirements. It takes a little more speculation to explain its being straight and not curved. There are two possibilities here. One is that the tusk was badly enough broken up that the people who reassembled it had the freedom to make it any shape they wanted. The other possibility is that it came from a different kind of extinct elephant, such as the palaeoloxodon, a species that went extinct about 15,000 years before the mammoth and that had much straighter tusks.

There is a cave near Quedinberg called the Einhornhöhle or Unicorn Cave. Even before the gypsum miners on Zeunickenberg found their strange skeleton, the locals had been bringing bones out the local caves and selling them to apothecaries as “genuine” unicorn horn. This explains why the Quedlinberg burgers had unicorn on their minds as they tried to make sense out of a pile of broken bones. No doubt, someone had the idea of getting in on the unicorn trade. But the price of unicorn horn was crashing in the late Seventeenth Century and any plans they might have had never came to fruition. Leibniz visited the area in 1686 and crawled through several caves, but didn’t find any unicorns, which explains his noncommittal tone when he repeated Guericke’s story six years later.

That’s not the end of the story. In the Nineteenth Century, paleontologists explored the caves in the Harz Mountains and identified the bones of dozens of species of Pleistocene mammals. In the Twentieth century, the local governments realized the tourist potential of the caves and dug comfortable entrance tunnels into them. There are several small museums in the region proudly showing off the bones. There are several full sized models of the unicorn on display. One of them guards the entrance to the Einhornhöhle. Tourist shops sell paperweights and t-shirts adorned with Leibniz’s drawing. The Quedlinberg unicorn lives on.

Another Unicorn and How I Came to Write the Book

The mammoth book grew out of an idea for a single blog post. I love forbidden history and catastrophist books, such as those about Atlantis and Velikovskyism. It doesn't take long when reading these to notice that the all depend on a limited bits of evidence to prove vastly different theories. Among the favorites are the Great Pyramid and frozen mammoths. Out of curiosity, I decided one day to look at the history of mammoth discoveries to figure out what was known at the times different Atlantis writers wrote since it wouldn't be fair to criticize them for not knowing something that hadn't been discovered yet. As the blog post got out of hand, it occurred to me that this long essay could perhaps become a small book. I had four books on mammoths at the time. I figured those four and a couple of books on paleontology would be all I needed. I wasn't that serious about it; it was just an idea.

Just as the blog post had gotten out of hand, the essay began to get out of hand. In each of the books I found discoveries and ideas that I wanted to know more about. I began mining the bibliographies of those four books. I found minor mistakes in them and differences of interpretation that bothered me. I mined the bibliographies a little further. One day I shelled out almost eighty bucks for a Nineteenth Century book and realized that I was starting to get serious. Atlantis had vanished from the idea and it was all about mammoths. About five years ago, I realized I really was writing a book. When I began spending more and more time tracking down primary sources for various bits of data and context, I realized I was also writing the dissertation that had never happened when I dropped out of grad school.

And then I entered my translation phase. When I first got serious, machine translation was still pretty iffy, but it's improved dramatically over the last few years. Whereas I once groaned at the thought of doing a few paragraphs of a modern language, I now think nothing of ten pages of Latin. Naturally, this has meant digging into even more original sources. Sometimes this means even when an English translation is available, I'll go to the original to make sure I'm not missing anything. This is how I made my latest discovery.

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz is probably best known for inventing calculus. But he was much more than a mathematician; he wrote about philosophy, medicine, physics, linguistics, history, and politics; he tinkered with lamps, clocks, pumps, and invented an adding machine; I've heard he mixed the best Bloody Mary in all Germany and danced a mean Polka; he also took a shot at geology and paleontology. In 1690, his patron, the Elector of Hanover, commissioned him to write a history of the province of Brunswick. Leibniz chose to start with the geological prehistory of the land as a background for the human and dynastic history. He didn't get any further in his history. Thirty years after his death, this essay was published under the title Protagea.

Leibniz's contribution to mammoth history appears in Protagea. Leibniz recounted a story told originally by Otto Gericke, the inventor of the vacuum pump, of the discovery of some unicorn bones near Quedlinberg in the Harz Mountains. He also published a reconstruction of the unicorn skeleton that he received from an unnamed second source. The teeth are probably mammoth's teeth and the skull is probably from a woolly rhino, but the horn, which was reassembled from pieces, is clearly a mammoth's tusk that was straightened by the reconstructors. The unicorn drawing is a standard part of mammoth lore.

I had read that Leibniz's text description was lifted from Gericke's almost word for word. The "almost" got my attention. Yesterday, I decided to compare the two to see if Leibniz had left out or changed anything (he hadn't). Gericke's description is in his book on the vacuum pump. Don't ask me why; that's just how they rolled in the Seventeenth Century. Naturally, the book is in Latin, but so is the first edition of Protagea, making a direct comparison possible. While hunting for the passage in Protagea I came across a familiar word "mammotekoos"--mammoth bones. This word appears two pages before the unicorn story but it has never been mentioned in any previous book on mammoths.

I know of only one other mammoth writer who has mentioned Leibniz’s mammotekoos, but not in the context of mammoths. Claudine Cohen, a French historian of science, published The Fate of the Mammoth in 2002. About a third of her book covers the same material that I'm covering. She uses Gericke and Leibniz unicorn as the launching point for one of her chapters, but she missed the mammotekoos. Ironically, in 2010 she edited and published an English translation of Protogaea with commentary. In the chapter where mammotekoos appears, she has a small footnote on the word. If she had written the Protagea commentary before her mammoth book she would have been able comment on the relevance of the word in the context of mammoths and all I would be able to do would been to agree or disagree with what she said. Ha-ha, now I get to go first.

Alright, what is there to say about Leibniz and the word mammotekoos? The context of his use is a passage about bones found in the caves of the Harz Mountains. These caves are a treasure-trove for paleontologists. Many of the caves contain bones of Pleistocene megafauna such as cave bears, woolly rhinoceros, and mammoths. Leibniz took the, then common, position that these bones had been washed there by the Biblical Deluge. He also held to a less common idea that the North Sea had once extended as far south as the Harz Mountains. This idea was necessary to explain seashells in lower strata. In Protagea, he suggests that the latter could also be used as an explanation for unicorn horn and other fossil ivory, in that they were probably really walrus tusks.

Here is the quote. It's a mix of Cohen's translation and a little grammatical editing by me. 

So there was nothing to stop foreign animals to be brought to us by the force of the waves, although I find elephants less believable because they could belong to the Rosmarus [walrus] I mentioned above. The teeth reportedly dug up in Mexico are perhaps of the same kind since no elephants are found in America today. I would say the same thing of those heavy teeth, like the bones of whales, called Mammotekoos by the Moscovites and attributed to the elephant, as Witsen reports. Yet, I will not obstinately deny that true elephant’s bones are sometimes found. Certainly, we have seen teeth and a part of the tibia and other bones taken from the Scharzfeld cave. No one could say whether they came from an elephant or similar animal; whether in the past they might have been more widely scattered throughout the world than today; whether their nature or the nature of the world had changed; or whether they had been moved from a far country by the rushing waters.

 Leibniz is clear that the bones in the Harz Mountains are not something that can be taken for granted; they are problem that needs to be solved. He lists several possible solutions and lets us know his preferences: the Biblical Deluge for most bones and a further south coastline for most of the ivory. He also recognizes that the ivory is the biggest problem and allows that some of it could be elephant ivory. For real elephant ivory, he still prefers the Biblical Deluge but admits that it is possible the elephants could have been native the region, but that would mean either elephants were different in those days or that the environment was. That final point is an interesting foreshadowing of things to come. The environmental solution would not have been entirely outrageous as many philosophers believed the Earth had been uniformly pleasant with a year-round growing season and that seasons were part of the wreck of the world brought by the Flood.

This passage is important in that Leibniz is the first writer to bring together European fossil elephants, giant bones from the New World, the majority of which would have been mastodons, and the Siberian mammoth and recognize them as probably related species. Of course, his solution that they were all walruses is wrong, but not unreasonable for the times. The Witsen Leibniz mentions as his source for mammotekoos Nicholaes Witsen. Witsen knew ivory. As a Dutch merchant he had been to the East Indies and to Africa where he had purchased the tusks of both Asian and African elephants. He knew about Siberian mammoth ivory because he had been to the markets of Moscow and interrogated the ivory merchants there. In his book on Russia and Siberia, Noord en Oost Tartarye, he recognized that mammoth ivory looked like real elephant ivory. He wouldn't go so far as to say it really came from elephants only that, if it did, it could only be because dead elephants were washed there by the Flood. Witsen did not mention walruses, but he did say that most mammoth ivory came from the Arctic coast. By the time of Witsen and Leibniz, Europeans had known about the Russian ivory trade for over 150 years. Leibniz, who had not seen a mammoth tusk, appears to have assumed that mammoth was no more than another name for walrus. He was not the last to make that assumption. As late as thirty years later, after whole tusks and other bones of mammoths had been carried to Western Europe for examination, Theodore Hase could still publish a fifty-eight page tract arguing that mammoth was another word for walrus.

This passage in Protagea offers something for Leibniz scholars, though I'm not sure if it rises above the level of curious trivia or not. Leibniz devotes quite a few pages to fossils so I'm sure everything I said above about Leibniz’s attitudes regarding fossils has been said in the past; only my emphasis on elephants and mammoths is original. The word mammotekoos is a point that can be used to date that part of the Protagea. It is known that Leibniz worked on his history through 1691-3. Witsen's Noord en Oost Tartarye was published in 1692, placing Leibniz’s composition of that passage in the second half of the period. If Leibniz had published Protagea as a separate volume as soon as he finished it, his would have been only the third time any form of the word mammoth had appeared in print.

This is why my book is taking so long. Not only have I spent almost three years translating and retranslating primary sources and lost most of another year due to personal crises, I also have these obsessive moments when I'll spend two days analyzing a half of a paragraph. On the other hand, it's this kind of obsessiveness that leads me to make new discoveries. Up above where I said Protagea could have been the third time any form of mammoth had appeared in print, the Oxford English Dictionary would tell you it would have been the second, with Witsen as the first. I know of an earlier one. As far as I know, I'll be the first person to draw attention to it. That alone should be a good enough reason for you to buy several copies of the book when it comes out.

And now, since the original purpose of looking at Leibniz was to comment on the Quedlinburg unicorn, I should get to work on that. I'll post a partial rough draft with the amazing drawing later today or tomorrow.

Book Update

Five weeks ago, I sent my completed proposal and polished chapter to an editor who had expressed an interest in it. I haven't heard anything and I've essentially lost hope for that outcome. I know, with fiction manuscripts, it can be months before a response comes back, but I have been told that things are much quicker with non-fiction proposals. So, what's next? I'm going to rework the proposal a little and look into getting an agent.

Problem of the day: One part of the proposal that I need to improve is the biography, which should be approximately the same text that will be used on the book's dust jacket. I have a really lame biography. I have no relevant credentials or experience and no publications. Even claiming I've been interested in mammoths for a long time is a bit of a stretch. I have a small plastic mammoth that I've carried around since kindergarten, but mammoths have only been a big deal for me since around the time I started blogging ten years ago. I am confident that I know more about my topic--history of mammoth knowledge--but, how do I demonstrate my authority. Suggestions?

New Mammoth Comes with Grains of Salt

Frozen mammoths are rare. That's why I was excited to hear this morning to that a new one had discovered. Over the last three centuries, only seventy-three frozen mammoths with skin or flesh attached have been reported. Most were only partial--a foot or a piece of skin--some were only seen with nothing being recovered. However, despite being exciting news, there were several things about the story that set off alarms in my head and made me cringe.

First, is the headline and hook to the story: "Russian scientists make rare find of 'blood' in mammoth." The significance of the blood is explained in the story. Semyon Grigoryev, the head of the team examining the mammoth explained:

"When we broke the ice beneath her stomach, the blood flowed out from there, it was very dark. This is the most astonishing case in my entire life. How was it possible for it to remain in liquid form? And the muscle tissue is also red, the colour of fresh meat."

Liquid blood strikes me as more than astonishing; it borders on completely impossible. Thawed blood, yes. Remaining liquid for over ten thousand years surrounded by rock-hard ice and frozen flesh, no. Grigoryev says they found the blood on the underside of the carcass. This means they had already chipped and thawed their way to that spot, that it had already been exposed to heat when he dug into it.

The bit about the color of the meat is pure melodrama. This is something that is said about most discoveries of frozen Pleistocene animals. When Pfitzenmayer and Herz excavated the famous Berezovka mammoth in 1901, they commented on how fresh the meat looked. They also said the smell of the thawed meat was so bad that they could only work short shifts digging it out before they had to run for fresh air.

My second alarm was, perhaps unfairly, the presence of Grigoryev himself. Grigoryev is a partner with disgraced Korean cloner Hwang Woo-suk. Hwang, for those who don't know or remember, is a very skilled scientist whose career imploded in 2005-6 over fraudulent claims that he had cloned human stem cells. Naturally, the liquid blood is being touted as a big step forward in eventually cloning a mammoth. The cloning angle appears in the first sentence of the story.

The presence of Hwang and the cloning frame don't necessarily disqualify Grigoryev. Last year, he announced the discovery of another mammoth, a young male that they named Zhenya. The announcement included a great deal of hype about it being the most complete mammoth ever recovered. At the time I had never heard of Grigoryev. However, despite the hyperbole and his being new to the scene, it appears the discovery was legit. Zhenya was excavated and moved to St. Petersburg where Alexei Tikhonov, an old hand at mammoth research, confirmed that it really is an important find.

The third alarm, for me, is the photograph attached to the story that purports to be an actual shot taken at the excavation. The photo shows a person in cold-weather gear, a surgical mask, and nitrile gloves. The person is down on one knee in front of a large hunk of the mammoth that has already been loaded onto a sled. The person appears to be filling a test-tube and we are left to believe the person is extracting blood from the carcass. The caption reads: "A researcher in Yakutsk on May 13 next to a carcass of a female mammoth found on an island in the Arctic Ocean." A second picture shows a different person's hand holding up a test tube with a few drops of blood in the bottom.

Perhaps I'm being picky, but there's no way that is can actually be a shot of the vignette suggested. Even if they found liquid blood in the mammoth when it was in the ground, it would not have stayed liquid while they excavated that piece of meat and loaded it onto a sled. The site is described as "a remote island in the Arctic Ocean." Despite the sunlight in the picture and news of record Arctic sea ice retreats, it is still very cold up there this time of year and no matter how warm the surface air gets, it remains well below freezing year-round in the permafrost.

Another reason I don't like the picture is the hunk of mammoth behind the researcher. What is that piece? Maybe it's just pareidolia, but it looks like the head and shoulders of the mammoth with its trunk dramatically raised over its head. There is no way the trunk could have stayed in that position while it froze. Maybe it was on its side while it froze? The story makes clear that that was not the case. They say the stomach was in water and the meat of the back and head were eaten by scavengers. So, the mammoth was upright and the scavengers probably got the trunk. That makes this the stomach and a leg, though the shape and position make it had to figure out just how this fits into a complete mammoth. If that is the stomach, where the blood was found, it makes another part of the story hard to understand. The mammoth location is being kept secret, they say, because the researchers don't want anyone else to steal it. If they've already excavated the stomach, they pretty much have the whole mammoth out of the ground. So, again, just what is that hunk of mammoth on the sled?

As a final gripe, let me say why I hate the cloning frame for mammoth stories. Cloning is not the news part of this story and does not belong in the lede sentence. At most, cloning is background material. The news part of the story is the discovery itself. Of those seventy-four frozen mammoth discoveries that I mentioned, this is only the fifth I know of that is a female and this one was the oldest when she died (most reports don't know or don't mention the sex). That is what should be the big deal about this news, not that someone thinks maybe they could possibly attempt to make a clone from this mammoth at some undefined time in the future. If they are able to recover satisfactory material to attempt a clone, that would be a story in its own right. If they made the attempt, that would be another story, whether they were successful or not. And, of course, if they successfully cloned a mammoth or bred a mammelephant, that would be one of the biggest science stories of the century. None of those things have happened. The news here is that a rare old female mammoth has been discovered.

The story is bad science reporting, pure and simple. It's science by press release. It allows sensationalism to bury the real science. Cloning and "will it tell us why they went extinct" stories are lazy and ignorant writing. It's crap and I do not like it. Please stop.

UPDATE - The official press release from North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk is a little more detailed and a lot less sensational that the PhysOrg notice. It has a less ridiculous picture and says that most of the mammoth is still in the ground and will stay there until the summer when an international group of mammoth specialists will come look at the site. The cloning angle is barely mentioned and only in the last sentence.

As for the blood, some more details were given about that, "The blood is very dark, it was found in ice cavities below the belly and when we broke these cavities with a poll pick, the blood came running out. Interestingly, the temperature at the time of excavation was -7 to –10°C. It may be assumed that the blood of mammoths had some cryoprotective properties." If that's true, that would be quite an exciting discovery. Mammoth blood did do a better job of carrying oxygen at low temperatures than does the blood of living elephants, but, so far, no one has even suspected the presence of cryoprotective properties. Why should they. We've never had a speck of evidence that mammoths hibernated and we've never found liquid blood in any other frozen carcase. I remain skeptical.

The Halle Unicorn

In the southern parts of the German speaking lands the earth produced amazing things. It was not uncommon for brewers, storing their beer in cool caves, to come across the skulls of enormous bears or miners to bring up pieces of brown coal with the images of leaves miraculously pressed into them. In 1577 an oak tree near Luzern was knocked over in a storm and beneath its roots were revealed bones which the famous surgeon Felix Platter asserted were those of a man nineteen feet tall. In 1605 a horn of extraordinary size and beauty was discovered in the ground near the Free City of Halle in Swabia.

The horn could have been sold. There were many buyers for such oddities. This was not an unusual fate for something unique. Many churches had collections of unusual objects that were brought out on holy days to impress the parishioners with God's majestic and mysterious ways. In time, weather and handling would destroy such objects--there was a moral lesson in that, too. The Halle horn was different. Some cleric or town father decided that it was special enough that they arranged for a permanent display; it was placed in a frame of iron that was hoisted up high in the church of St. Michael above the town market. There, no one could damage it.

The Halle horn. Source.

Near the frame, they posted a poem:

Tausend Sechshundert und Fünff Jahr,
Den Dreyzehend Febuarii ich gefunden war,
Bey Neubronn an dem Hällischen Land,
Um Bühler Fluss zur lincken Hand,
Samt grossen Knochen und lang Gebein,
Sag Lieber, was Arth ich mag seyn.

One thousand six hundred and five years,
The thirteenth of February I was found,
At Neubronn in the Hall country,
On the left bank of the Bühler River,
With me were large bones and long bones,
Tell me dear, what might I be.

I doubt that it was a serious question with big cash prizes. The poem was just a bit of fun. The frame made clear what the correct answer was. It was a unicorn horn.

In those years, the learned men of Europe had begun questioning the reality of the unicorn as an animal. No one had ever seen or captured a unicorn. Biblical and Classical scholars questioned whether the word unicorn in ancient texts really meant the same thing as the animal pictured in Medieval bestiaries. Dutch and Portuguese travellers brought back descriptions of the rhinoceros, an animal that could convincingly be argued to have been the source of the legends.

What was less questioned was the existence of the substance called unicorn horn. No apothecary's kit was complete with out a good supply of powdered unicorn horn. It had 1001 uses. The most important was as a protection against and an antidote to poison. Although the heyday of Renaissance poisoning was past, anyone who was anyone still had someone who wanted them dead and it was better to be safe than dead. Over the years, many substances had been marketed as real unicorn horn. Unscrupulous doctors had been
known to grind up teeth and bones and even chalk and market it as the real thing. The learned professors were not sure what true unicorn horn was. Some said it was the strangely twisted tooth of a kind of whale found near Greenland and Iceland. Others said it was a kind of subterranean ivory called "unicornu fossili" or "ebur fossili" that was dug up in southern Germany. You can guess which position was favored in around Swabian Halle.

Taking all that into consideration, maybe the riddle was serious as well as playful. Look again at the frame. The two unicorns in the ironwork have long thin and straight horns as different as possible from the wide horn that curls around them. Maybe the unicorns are not the answer but, rather, a hint. The correct answer is not "a unicorn's horn;" it's "unicorn horn." The medicinal properties of unicorn horn are acknowledged by the metaphorical figure on the right who holds the Rod of Asclepius, the serpent encircled baton that symbolizes healing. The allegorical figure to the left of the horn holds a celestial sphere, possibly signifying the astrological element that was still believed to be an important part of healing.*

The horn was still there over a century later. St Michaels survived a siege during the Thirty Years War and it survived two major city fires that destroyed over a third of the city. During the rebuilding that followed the fire of 1728, many pieces of unicornu fossile were dug up. This got Friedrich Hoffman, a professor at the university and the German who identified German measles, thinking about the ivory. By Hoffman's time the belief in the medicinal power of unicornu fossili was on it's way out.

When he wrote down his thoughts a few years after the fire, Hoffman was writing the final chapter on unicorn horn. He wrote a review of the literature of the previous century and gave himself the task of figuring out just what unicornu fossili had been. His conclusion was that it had been many things. He was inclined to think much of it had been jokes of nature, objects formed inside the earth that mimicked the appearance of bones, shells, and human artifacts. He also concluded that some real elephant ivory had been found in Germany and elsewhere Ernst Tenzel had identified beyond any doubt the skeleton of an elephant found at Burgtonna thirty years earlier. The ivory found in Russia called "mammont" was also most likely from elephants. And, despite it's extreme curve, he was sure the horn in St. Michael's was also an elephant's tusk.

The Michaelskirche Mammutzahn today. Source.

The church of St. Michael has survived three more centuries. Though the industrial revolution mostly bypassed Halle and thousands of her citizens emigrated, the church was never allowed to fall into disrepair. Even though the Allies bombed the nearby rail station and Luftwaffe base, the old town was mostly spared. Today tourism helps maintain the church. And the horn is still there. Though it is clarly a mommoth horn. the town hasn't given up on its unicorn heritage. Halle is home to a American style football team. The name of the team is the Unicorns.

* If anyone can help with the other two symbols or any other aspects of the allegorical figures, let me know. 

Book Update

After lots of procrastination and fussing, I finally sent off the book proposal last night. I'm not sure if I'm relieved or terrified at the moment.

Shetland Mammoths Were Bigger Than Shetland Ponies

A few weeks ago, some surveyors in the Shetland Islands north of Scotland came across an interesting piece of bone. It was about a foot in length, thick, curved and broken at both ends. They thought it might be a piece of walrus tusk, but it was unusual enough that they took it to Val Turner, the island archaeologist. Turner is not a paleontologist, but she knew enough to realize this was not a walrus tusk. She bundled it up and sent it to the Paleontology Museum of Uppsala University in Sweden.

Based on the nature of this blog, I'm sure you can all guess what it is. If I was there I could have told them in less than a minute that it was a piece of tusk from a proboscid, and determined whether it was from a mammoth or a modern elephant (the trick is to look at something called Schreger lines). That is what Uppsala told Turner.

Why is this a big deal? Sections of mammoth ivory are found all over the North and this one is a pretty ratty looking piece. What makes this piece unique and explains Turner's inability to identify is that no evidence of mammoths has ever been seen on the Shetlands.

The islands were completely buried under the ice during the last glacial maximum. Because so much water was locked up in the ice caps the oceans were several hundred feet lower during the glacial maxima. Britain was attached to the mainland and most of the North Sea was dry (or ice covered land). Mammoth ivory is fairly common in England and Ireland and trawlers regularly bring up mammoth bones and ivory from the sea.

This brings up two possibilities to explain the ivory. First, is that a small population of mammoths established themselves on the islands after the ice melted, but before the ocean had risen to its current level. Second, is that this is a piece of ivory washed up from the North Sea during a storm. Hurricane force storms are not uncommon in those parts.

For now, the Shetland Amenity Trust has closed the area where the tusk was found. This week, experts from Uppsala arrived to hunt for other mammoth bones. I'll be watching for follow-up news.