agreed-upon name and was variously referred to as an incognitum, an Ohio
animal, and, most confusingly of all, a mammoth. It became the world’s
first blockbuster exhibit and set off a wave of “mammoth fever.” The town
of Cheshire, Massachusetts, produced a 1,230-pound “mammoth cheese”;
a Philadelphia baker produced a “mammoth bread”; and the newspapers
reported on a “mammoth parsnip,” a “mammoth peach tree,” and a
“mammoth eater” who “swallowed 42 EGGS in ten minutes.” Peale also
managed to piece together a second mastodon, out of additional bones
found in Newburgh and nearby towns in the Hudson Valley. After a
celebratory dinner held underneath the animal’s capacious rib cage, he
dispatched this second skeleton to Europe with two of his sons. The
skeleton was exhibited for several months in London, during which time
the younger Peales decided that the animals’ tusks must have pointed
downward, like a walrus’s. Their plan was to take the skeleton on to Paris
and sell it to Cuvier. But while they were still in London, war broke out
between Britain and France, making travel between the countries
impossible.
Cuvier finally gave the mastodonte its name in a paper published in
Paris in 1806. The peculiar designation comes from the Greek meaning
“breast tooth”; the knobby protuberances on the animal’s molars