predicted, shaped like a salamander’s. The creature was not an
antediluvian human but something far weirder: a giant amphibian.
The more extinct species Cuvier turned up, the more the nature of the
beasts seemed to change. Cave bears, giant sloths, even giant salamanders
—all these bore some relationship to species still alive. But what to make
of a bizarre fossil that had been found in a limestone formation in Bavaria?
Cuvier received an engraving of this fossil from one of his many
correspondents. It showed a tangle of bones, including what looked to be
weirdly long arms, skinny fingers, and a narrow beak. The first naturalist
to examine it had speculated that its owner had been a sea animal and had
used its elongated arms as paddles. Cuvier, on the basis of the engraving,
determined—shockingly—that the animal was actually a flying reptile. He
called it a ptero-dactyle, meaning “wing-fingered.”
CUVIER’S discovery of extinction—of “a world previous to ours”—was a
sensational event, and news of it soon spread across the Atlantic. When a
nearly complete giant skeleton was unearthed by some farmhands in
Newburgh, New York, it was recognized as a find of great significance.
Thomas Jefferson, at this point the vice president, made several attempts
to get his hands on the bones. He failed. But his even more persistent
friend, the artist Charles Willson Peale, who’d recently established the
nation’s first natural history museum, in Philadelphia, succeeded.
Peale, perhaps an even more accomplished showman than Cuvier,
spent months fitting together the bones he’d acquired from Newburgh,
fashioning the missing pieces out of wood and papier-mâché. He
presented the skeleton to the public on Christmas Eve, 1801. To publicize
the exhibition, Peale had his black servant, Moses Williams, don an Indian
headdress and ride through the streets of Philadelphia on a white horse.
The reconstructed beast stood eleven feet high at the shoulder and
seventeen feet long from tusks to tail, a somewhat exaggerated size.
Visitors were charged fifty cents—quite a considerable sum at the time—
for a viewing. The creature—an American mastodon—still lacked an