![]() ![]() The final stop of Koch's tour was London, where the mastodon was displayed in an exhibition hall in Piccadilly. Back then it was common for people to try to accommodate stories from the Bible,' Adrian says. 'Although it's easy to fall into the trap of mocking Koch for his invention, the truth is nobody really knew how this animal lived. He toured it all over North America and even crossed the Atlantic to Europe, which was a very costly undertaking at the time. ![]() Koch believed it was an underwater creature that used those big tusks as hooks to hang onto underwater branches.' 'He called it the Missouri Leviathan - referring to the biblical sea monster - and had some pretty interesting theories about the way it life. 'At the time some scientists in Europe had already encountered related kinds of animals and had drawn them with some accuracy, but Koch either didn't know about it or he didn't care,' says Adrian. He exaggerated the animal's size in every direction - adding several vertebrae and ribs, placing wood between vertebrae and installing the tusks so they emerged sideways. Uncovering a huge number of mastodon bones, Koch assembled a skeleton that was twice the size of a typical mastodon (which was in fact close in size to an Asian elephant). In 1840, when a farmer in Missouri, USA, found a number of large fossil bones on his property, Koch was quick to secure the rights to excavate. In the early nineteenth century, 'fossil showman' Albert Koch made a career out of exhibiting curiosities of the natural world. We now know a lot about how these animals lived and died - but it took years for the nineteenth-century scientific community to establish the facts of mastodon anatomy. This allowed them to walk on the soft, waterlogged ground beside ponds and lakes. Mastodons lived in pine forests and boggy areas covered by larch and spruce, feeding on twigs, leaves and water plants.Īdapted for life at the water's edge, they had broad feet and stubby, wide-splayed toe bones. The American mastodon was a large land mammal that roamed North America throughout the Ice Age until as recently as 13,000 years ago. He created a large and monstrous beast from the bones of the extinct mammals, and his bizarre creation went on to astonish audiences around the world, from Mississippi to London.Īdrian Lister explains how this specimen went from touring spectacle to Museum exhibit. When Albert Koch uncovered a graveyard of fossilised mastodons in 1840, he believed he had discovered nothing less than a mythical sea monster. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |