Britannica breaks my heart

While hunting for some old images of moeritherium, I came across this:

Everything on it is wrong. Admittedly, the order Proboscidea has a big bushy family tree and many of the lineages and connections are the subjects of active controversies. But this goes beyond valid controversy; it's just wrong.

Starting at the bottom.

The genus Moeritherium is not the ancestor of any later proboscidean species. Though it had a nice long run of its own (almost twenty million years) and produced about a half dozen species, it was a side branch that ultimately left no descendants. When Charles W. Andrews unearthed the first Moeritherium at Fayum, Egypt in 1901, the oldest known proboscidean fossils were gomphotheres from the early Miocene. His discovery pushed the history of the order back to the earliest Oligocene--ten million years, but they didn't know that yet. It was an easy jump to make from earliest elephant to ancestor of elephants and Andrews announced his discovery that way. However, additional discoveries by him and by others soon raised questions about that conclusion and most Twentieth Century paleontologists were content to call it a cousin.

Trilophodon isn't a recognised genus or species at all. The word was coined in 1857 by Hugh Falconer to describe a sub-genus of mastodons that included the American mastodon and about half of the family that later came to be called gomphotheres. The other half, he called Tetralophodons (the terms describe an element of tooth architecture). The words are used today as adjectives, not as formal names, for different types of gomphotheres. The illustration is probably supposed to be Gomphotherium angustidens, the most common and best known Old World gomphothere.

Depending which species the Britannica artist had in mind, they might have managed to get the relationship somewhat right with Platybelodon. It is a trilopodont gomphothere. It produced the final species of the sub-family Amebelodontinae.

As far as mammoths being descended from platybelodons, no, just no. Mammoths are not descended from trilopodont gomphotheres or from tetralopodont gomphotheres or any kind of gomphothere. Their last common ancestor existed about 23 million years ago before the various prodoscidean genera left Africa.

Mammuthus primigenius, the woolly mammoth, is not the ancestor of modern elephants. In fact, it didn't evolve until long after the three surviving elephant species had reached their current forms. The idea that it is an ancestor originated in the earliest days of paleontology, before evolution or the ice ages were understood or accepted. Johann Blumenbach, who first recognized that mammoths were different enough from modern elephants to need a unique scientific, name thought of them as a less refined local breed of elephant and named them Elephas primigenius - the primal or original elephant. It didn't take long for naturalists figure out that the mammoth was different enough to need its own genus - Mammuthus. Outside of creationist literature, I'm not sure where you would find a source that claims mammoths are ancestral to elephants written since the 1880s at the latest. Plus woolly mammoths weren't that large. While they weighed as much African savanna elephants, they were much more compact, shorter and thicker.

African and Mammoth/Asian elephants diverged from each other about seven million years ago. Each of those lines produced several species before the modern ones appeared, coincidentally around the same time, 2.5 million years ago. Mammoths separated from Asian elephants while their common ancestor still lived in Africa.

To sum up: four relationships that are wrong, one species that never existed, one in the wrong chronological order, one visually incorrect (in size), and Asian elephants aren't blue. A correct illustration should look something like this:

When did Britannica become so sloppy?

UPDATE: An editor at Britannica just tweeted me to thank me for bringing the problem to their attention and to say they'll get right on fixing it. My faith is restored.

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.

Boltunov's Drawing

In the winter of 1803-4, Roman Boltunov, a merchant from Yakutsk, worked his way down the Lena River selling and trading his goods. At that time of year, the main currency of the native Sakha and Evenki* would have been freshly trapped furs. In March, Boltunov reached Kumak Surka, the last village before the Lena Delta. There, the local headman, Ossip Shumachov, showed him two very nice mammoth tusks, which Boltunov promptly bought for fifty rubles in goods. Mammoth tusks weren't exactly rare on the coast east of the delta, and he was always happy to buy them if they were in good condition. What was special about this pair was where Shumachov said he found them: They had still been attached to a mammoth.

Anyone who spent any amount of time in Siberia knew about mammoths. Their horns or teeth or whatever they were sometimes found in the northern part of the country, usually in the coast or on the banks of rivers and they were valuable. Over the last forty or fifty years a whole profession of ivory hunting had grown up around them. The mammoth animal itself was a mystery. No one had ever seen a live one. On very rare occasions, dead ones were found on river banks, their flesh still bloody, as if they had died only days before. The Siberians, Russian and native, had many legends about them. One of the most common was that seeing a mammoth corpse was bad luck and that they should be avoided. On the other hand, educated Russians from the West and other Europeans were quite interested in mammoths and would even pay for information about them.

Since Shumachov didn't seem particularly afraid of the mammoth, Boltunov was able to convince him to take him to place where the rest of the carcass was. This involved more than a day trip. The mammoth remains were on the far side of the Bykovsky Peninsula facing the Arctic Ocean. The route led across the Lena and over a high range of hills, two days each direction. But Shumachov was proud of his find and maybe a few more goods were exchanged to encourage him.

It was snowing heavily when they got there. Scavengers had already gotten to this large block of free meat and eaten parts of it. Much of the face had been torn away. Still, the majority of it was still there and in one piece. Boltunov cleared away enough snow to get a good look at it and examined the head. What he saw was bigger than any animal he had ever seen or heard of. It was covered with long rust-colored hair. It had a fat body and thick legs. He made some measurements on the spot. Later on, he wrote down some of the details and, on the opposite side of the same sheet, made a drawing from memory. He was correct that the trip would be worthwhile; when he returned to Yakutsk the head of the merchant's guild bough his notes and drawing. This is the first reconstruction that we have of a mammoth that is based on more than just bones.

Two years later, the drawing came to the attention of an Adjunct member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, Mikhail Adams, a botanist who passed through Yakutsk on his way to collect specimens on the lower Lena. Though he was not impressed with the drawing—he described it as "very incorrect"—Adams dutifully forwarded it to the Academy with the notice that he was going directly to Kumak Surka to see if anything of the mammoth could be saved. The Academy was extremely excited by the discovery and published Boltunov's notes as a letter in their popular Russian language newspaper, Technological Journal.** Adams continued the coast and was able to recover most of the bones, three quarters of the skin, and a large sack of hair.

Sixty years later, Karl von Baer went looking for Boltunov's drawing. Baer is usually remembered as the father of embryology, but he also did geological research in the Russian Arctic and was interested in mammoths. Baer could not find the original in the Academy archives but he knew copies of it had been sent abroad. Wilhelm Keferstein at Göttingen University was able to find one among the papers of Johann Blumenbach. Baer suspected that it might even have been the original. It’s probably a copy. Wilhelm Tilesius, writing around 1810, said the original was still in the Academy archives. Keferstein sent Baer a sketch based on Blumenbach’s document and a transcription of the notes on the document. Baer was nice enough to write it up and publish it where I could find it. Copies of Keferstein's sketch were published in several journals at the time. The drawing along with the hair and skin samples are preserved in the Göttingen museum.

Roman Boltunov’s reconstruction of the dead mammoth on Bykovsky Peninsula, 1804. This is the first reconstruction of a mammoth based on more than bones. Source.

Adams wrote that the drawing was "very incorrect…something between a pig and an elephant." Tilesius called it "a poor drawing of a monstrous figure…a most inexperienced and unskilled work." At first glance it’s hard to disagree with them. But, considering the information he had to work with, it’s not a bad reconstruction. It demonstrates an intelligent mind and an active curiosity attempting to extract the most information possible from a small amount of information. It is very possible, even likely, that Boltunov had never seen a picture of an elephant and had no reference point for elephantness. He would, however, have seen a boar. Most large mammals he would have been familiar with—dogs, cattle, horses, reindeer—had long relatively thin legs and heads that rose up from the body. Only bears and pigs had thick bodies, heavier legs, and heads that protruded forward from the body. Whether consciously or subconsciously, he used a boar as a model to fill the gaps in his knowledge.

The trunk was gone when he saw the carcass; the base of the trunk could very well have resembled a pig’s snout. The tusks in his drawing look bizarre; one seems to be pointing up while the other points down. Baer believed that Boltunov was inexpertly trying to indicate that he believed the tusks should have pointed outward. Even in Baer's time, most scientists believed they pointed outward. The tusks are correctly placed in the upper jaw, not in the lower as they would have been in a boar. The way the tusks are pushed together in the snout is also correct. Mammoth’s tusks start much closer together than those of living elephants. At the top of the drawing is a separate drawing a mammoth’s tooth, which would have been very different from any mammal he was familiar with.

The drawing shows tiny ears on top of the mammoth’s head, which do not match Boltunov's written description. In the latter, he says the ears were six arshins (about eleven inches) long and on the “outside” of the head. I suspect this contradiction means he wrote his notes and made his drawing at two different times. The eyes are far too high on the head. This I think is a result of faulty memory. The skin around the eyes and top of the head was still there when Adams arrives two years later. The body is more elephant-like than boar-like, boxy with pillar legs and a short tail. The only boar-like details on the body are what appear to be fetlocks and thin hooves. Finally, Boltunov drew little lines around the mammoth that show the hair running the full length of its body.

Adams would have done well not to have dismissed Boltunov so quickly. Boltunov saw the mammoth a full two years before Adams when the carcass was in much better condition. By comparing Boltunov's observations with his own, Adams would have avoided some of the mistakes that he made. The mammoth still had its tail when Boltunov saw it. He not only drew the tail, he measured and took note of its length. The tail was gone when Adams arrived and he concluded that the mammoth never had had one. Most of the hair was still on the mammoth when Boltunov saw it and his drawing shows hair the same length over most of the body. Most of the hair had fallen off by the time Adams arrived and, based on where he found hair on the ground, he concluded that the mammoth had a great mane.

Adams was remarkably incurious about the mammoth. His memoir of the trip to recover it is more of a travelogue than a scientific paper. Other scientists complained about his lack of relevant details, but it never occurred to any of them to contact Boltunov (or Shumachov, for that matter) to collect information from a witness who was very curious. Except for Baer's 1866 paper, I can find no reference to Boltunov that treats his drawing as anything other than an example of how wrong ignorant Siberians could be. Of course, cultural arrogance is hardly unique to that century. The scientists of the time could have gained useful information by mining Boltunov's notes and drawing for data. They could have gained much more if they had written to the governor and had someone interview him. Even though Boltunov has little to tell us today about mammoths, he has plenty to tell us about Boltunov and how people of his time, location, and class viewed their world. Maybe it’s time to take Boltunov's drawing a little more seriously.

* Sakha is the preferred name by those people who, until recently, were called Yakuts by outsiders. The Evenki are the largest of several peoples who are usually lumped together as Tungus.

** This is not the same as the official journal of the Academy, Mémoires de l'Académie Impériale des Sciences de St. Pétersbourg, which was in Latin. Later, they would make the very sensible decision to keep the French title and publish the articles in German.

Draw Columbo the Mammoth

Two years ago, I made a special trip to visit a mammoth excavation outside Yakima, WA. The mammoth was discovered by a construction crew putting the finishing touches on a road to the home of Doug, and Bronwyn Mayo. The Mayos have been civic-minded enough to allow Central Washington University to keep the site as a teaching site. Every summer, CWU professors bring a group of paleontology students over to work on the site for eight weeks and give tours to interested tourists (like me). Besides just letting the University take over their driveway for two months out of the year, the Mayos take an active part in educating the public and have their own website.


2009 winning entry by Kayla Dexter
If you know any budding nature artists, this is their chance to get involved. The Mayos are sponsoring a draw the mammoth contest for K-12 students. The deadline is July 30, 2010 and the winner gets $25 and a Wenas Mammoth t-shirt, which is way cooler than any dinosaur shirt. The details are here. I'll be putting up a reminder closer to the deadline.