July 20, 2026 • 13 mins
In the 1700s, fossil finds along the Ohio and Hudson Rivers indicated that North America was home to mysterious beasts. Learn how mastodon bones proved both that extinction is real and that America isn't full of degenerates in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://animals.howstuffworks.com/extinct-animals/mastodon-boneyard-that-stole-thomas-jeffersons-heart.htm
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
Lauren Bobebam here. As much as paleontology is about revealing
the stories of creatures that lived long ago, it also
tells the stories of the scientific process and progress and
biases of the time in which it's conducted. We've talked
(00:26):
a bit about this before on the show, in episodes
about specific dinosaurs or about paleo art. You can track
science's concept of what a dinosaur even is through depictions
of say, a Terranosaurus rex, from the lizard like and
shrink wrapped images of the past to the birdlike and
dad bad depictions of today. Along similar lines, you can
(00:50):
track science's concepts of extinction and evolution through dealings with
mastodon fossils throughout the seventeen hundreds, and one of the
United States founders, Thomas Jefferson, used them to defend the
very honor of his emerging country. But okay, let's step
way back. During the Last Ice Age, what's now Boone
(01:14):
County in northern Kentucky was a swampy wetland teeming with
mega animals. On the ground lay exposed deposits of salt
or salt licks that attracted herbivores in need of sodium supplements.
Predators such as humans grew wise to this and ambushed
careless animals at the licks. The swamps were not safe
(01:36):
loitering places overall, Every so often creatures that came to
eat the salt or each other got stuck in the
mud and died. Radiometric dating tells us that the earliest
victims perished there just over eighteen thousand years ago. Time
turned the region into a graveyard, a mass burial site
(01:56):
loaded with fossilized bones along the Ohio River Valley. Some
were left behind by species that still exist today, like cariboo.
Others represent mastodons, ground sloths, and other extinct giants. The
first Europeans to learn of the Ohio River's amazing bone
bed were members of a French military expedition led by
(02:19):
Charles the third le Moin de Longue. When his party
visited the area in seventeen thirty nine, the native Abenaki
guides who hunted for them found some fossilized tusks, a
few teeth, and one femur as big as a person.
Thanks to these colossal fossils, the area became known as
Big bone Lick. It still goes by that name today.
(02:43):
LEMOUI sent these specimens to King Louis the fifteenth in Paris.
Elephant like fossils were of some interest to Europeans at
the time, due to other finds earlier in the seventeen hundreds,
no one really knew what to make of them. A
tooth and other bones found in the Hudson River Valley
in New York in seventeen oh five were speculated to
(03:04):
be from an ancient giant humanoid with ribs like rafters.
It was only in the seventeen twenties that European naturalists
identified teeth and tusks found in Siberia, Italy and the
British Isles as being from some kind of elephant like species,
though their best guess was that the bones were those
of everyday elephants washed there from southern climes during the
(03:28):
Biblical Great Flood. Parisian naturalists identified the big Bone Lick
fossils as being more of the same. Today, we know
that the Ohio River's bones belonged to the American mastodon,
a taxonomical name Mammet americanum. The Siberian, Italian, and British
bones and ones that would be found later in the
(03:48):
American West were from various species of mammoths, which are
related to mastodons, but in a separate genus anyway. Traders
and land surveyors collected additional fossils at Big Bone Lick
in these seventeen fifties and sixties. Scholars were especially intrigued
by the huge molars coming out of the site. The
(04:08):
biggest weighed more than six pounds or around three kilows,
and all of them had knobby cone shaped cups. The
modern consensus is that mastadons used these two too tough vegetation,
but in the eighteenth century many envisioned a different diet,
and it wasn't just the molars. Some naturalists thought that
(04:29):
the animal's tusks would have curved downward like saber teeth,
and some mistook the claws of ground slots as belonging
to mastodons. When Benjamin Franklin received a box of mastodon fossils,
he wrote a quote, The tusks agree with those of
the African and Asiatic elephant, but the grinders differ, being
full knobs like the grinders of a carnivorous animal. They
(04:54):
thought the mastodon was a colossal flesh eating monster. A
mast wound up getting their name because of these molars,
which it turned out, differed from the flatter teeth of mammoths.
But at the time this mysterious monster was called incognitum,
which is basically Latin for we don't know what it is.
(05:16):
Thomas Jefferson became obsessed with the fossils of the Ohio River,
partially because he was really into the study of nature,
but partially because he could use the incognitium to refute
a widely circulated argument about the inherent inferiority of the
so called New World. Okay, In seventeen sixty six, the
(05:38):
French naturalist Georges Louis the Clerk de Befolme published his
theory of American Degeneracy. Buffoon wondered why creatures of the
Americas tended to look puny next to their counterparts in Europe, Africa,
and Asia. For example, a next to one Indian tiger
the Mexican jaguar is a tabby for the article This
(06:00):
episode is based on How Stuffworks. Spoke via email with
environmental historian Mark Barrow Junior. He said Buffon was a
materialist who believed that a limited number of life forms
originally appeared on the Earth through spontaneous generation, and that
as they migrated to different environments, they responded to the
conditions they encountered there by changing form. So Buffon's theory
(06:26):
blamed the climate. Though he had never set foot in
the America's he assumed that it was a swampy place
that had only recently come up out of the sea,
and that this caused the animals that had come here
to degenerate, becoming quote weaker, smaller, and less able to reproduce.
And Buffoon didn't stop there. He claimed the same thing
(06:49):
had happened to human beings who had come to the Americas,
and that it would continue to happen to European immigrants offspring,
and that the Americas would there four never be home
to a great civilization. Barro said Americans found this theory
quite threatening, and Jefferson set out to disprove it. We're
(07:13):
going to get into how and why he sought out
living mastodons, but first we're going to get into a
quick break forward from our sponsors, and we're back. Thank
you sponsors, Okay. Thomas Jefferson, who was born in Virginia
and served as its second governor. Spent a lot of
(07:35):
time and energy on disproving the theory of American degeneracy in
the seventeen seventies and eighties, which we should note was
a busy time for the United States. In other ways,
in the midst and immediate aftermath of the Revolution, Jefferson
collected and published precise measurements of various American animals in
(07:56):
comparison with their European counterparts. He dragged friends and compatriots
into this with the help of the governor of New Hampshire.
He once sent the French naturalist Buffon a massive dead moose,
which was much worse for the travel and wearing a
set of antlers from some other animal because the original
set got lost along the way. But it was proof
(08:19):
that big animals do grow in the Americas, and in
his seventeen eighty five book Notes on the State of Virginia,
Jefferson bolstered his case by writing about the giant incognitum.
He called it a mammoth, then of big bone lick.
With the evidence mounting against Buffon's theory, it fell apart
(08:41):
much like the corpse of a moose arriving in Paris
a year after its untimely end a continent away. American
mammoths became a sensation and source of national pride, especially
after a nearly complete fossil model was compiled and displayed
in Charles Wilson Peel's Philadelphia Museum in eighteen oh one
with the help of enslaved labor. It was the second
(09:04):
ever fossil skeleton to be assembled in the world, and
the excavation of its components from the Hudson River Valley
was probably the first official paleontology expedition in the United States. Still,
Jefferson's love of fossils was ridiculed by his opponents in
the cutthroat presidential race of eighteen hundred. It was forty
(09:25):
years before dinosaurs would be recognized and catch the world's imagination,
but Jefferson carried the day and won the newly completed
White House. While in office, his biggest achievement was arguably
the Louisiana purchase of eighteen oh three. Before Meriwether Lewis
and William Clark set out to survey the newly bought land,
(09:47):
Jefferson told them to keep an eye out for living mammots.
Back then, extinction seemed impossible to many naturalists, including the President.
The basic idea it was that if the Earth is
a divine and perfect creation, then no part of it
could ever truly perish. There was a belief in a
(10:09):
great chain of being too great to be broken, Barrow said.
Since mastodons and mammoths could not possibly be extinct, Jefferson
and others thought they must still be roaming around in
the unexplored parts of the world, unexplored like to European
colonists the North American West. Though Lewis and Clark found
(10:32):
no live specimens, Lewis sent the President a couple of
new Incognium fossils from Big Bone Lick, at Jefferson's behest.
Clark returned to the Ohio River fossil bed with a
ten man team in eighteen oh seven. The fossils that
Clark's party dug up were proudly displayed at the Jefferson
White House. Meanwhile, back in Paris, a French anatomist known
(10:55):
as George Cuvier had been pouring over the different samples
of elephants and elephant like fossils that had been collected there.
In eighteen oh six, he published a study that determined
the Incognitium was a separate species from the mammoths and
named it mastadante. I always assumed that this was a
mast as an masticate and dante as in tooth, but
(11:18):
it turns out it was masked as in breast because
the guy found that the aforementioned knobs on the molars
reminded him of boobs. Anyway, Cuvier also included the truly
shocking hypothesis that both of these creatures were extinct, that
they were too different from living elephants to be the
same creatures, and that there was no evidence that they
(11:41):
were still roaming the earth. He laid out a concept
that throughout history there had been periodic catastrophic die offs
after which new species had supernaturally arisen, and that this
cycle continues. He didn't believe in evolution, to be clear,
he did believe in scientific racism, so he was not
(12:04):
always right. We wouldn't get in on evolution until a
half century later with Charles Darwin's work, but this study
of elephants and mammoths and mastodons marked the first time
that the wide European scientific community took the idea of extinction. Seriously,
not bad work for a bunch of old bones. Today,
(12:28):
some of those bones are on view in museums all
over the United States and Europe, then beyond, others returned
to Kentucky. In nineteen sixty, the Big Bone Lick Fossil
Site was incorporated into a new state park. A museum
is now on the premises, along with life sized statues
of the prehistoric critters. At the entrance, visitors are greeted
(12:51):
by a sign that reads Big Bone Lick Historic Site,
Birthplace of American Vertebrate Paleontology. Today's episode is based on
the article The mask Don Boneyard that Stole Thomas Jefferson's
Heart on HowStuffWorks dot com, written by Mark Mancini. Brain
Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with HowStuffWorks dot
(13:13):
Com and is produced by Tyler Quain. Four more podcasts
from my Heart Radio visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
Lauren Bobebam here. As much as paleontology is about revealing
the stories of creatures that lived long ago, it also
tells the stories of the scientific process and progress and
biases of the time in which it's conducted. We've talked
(00:26):
a bit about this before on the show, in episodes
about specific dinosaurs or about paleo art. You can track
science's concept of what a dinosaur even is through depictions
of say, a Terranosaurus rex, from the lizard like and
shrink wrapped images of the past to the birdlike and
dad bad depictions of today. Along similar lines, you can
(00:50):
track science's concepts of extinction and evolution through dealings with
mastodon fossils throughout the seventeen hundreds, and one of the
United States founders, Thomas Jefferson, used them to defend the
very honor of his emerging country. But okay, let's step
way back. During the Last Ice Age, what's now Boone
(01:14):
County in northern Kentucky was a swampy wetland teeming with
mega animals. On the ground lay exposed deposits of salt
or salt licks that attracted herbivores in need of sodium supplements.
Predators such as humans grew wise to this and ambushed
careless animals at the licks. The swamps were not safe
(01:36):
loitering places overall, Every so often creatures that came to
eat the salt or each other got stuck in the
mud and died. Radiometric dating tells us that the earliest
victims perished there just over eighteen thousand years ago. Time
turned the region into a graveyard, a mass burial site
(01:56):
loaded with fossilized bones along the Ohio River Valley. Some
were left behind by species that still exist today, like cariboo.
Others represent mastodons, ground sloths, and other extinct giants. The
first Europeans to learn of the Ohio River's amazing bone
bed were members of a French military expedition led by
(02:19):
Charles the third le Moin de Longue. When his party
visited the area in seventeen thirty nine, the native Abenaki
guides who hunted for them found some fossilized tusks, a
few teeth, and one femur as big as a person.
Thanks to these colossal fossils, the area became known as
Big bone Lick. It still goes by that name today.
(02:43):
LEMOUI sent these specimens to King Louis the fifteenth in Paris.
Elephant like fossils were of some interest to Europeans at
the time, due to other finds earlier in the seventeen hundreds,
no one really knew what to make of them. A
tooth and other bones found in the Hudson River Valley
in New York in seventeen oh five were speculated to
(03:04):
be from an ancient giant humanoid with ribs like rafters.
It was only in the seventeen twenties that European naturalists
identified teeth and tusks found in Siberia, Italy and the
British Isles as being from some kind of elephant like species,
though their best guess was that the bones were those
of everyday elephants washed there from southern climes during the
(03:28):
Biblical Great Flood. Parisian naturalists identified the big Bone Lick
fossils as being more of the same. Today, we know
that the Ohio River's bones belonged to the American mastodon,
a taxonomical name Mammet americanum. The Siberian, Italian, and British
bones and ones that would be found later in the
(03:48):
American West were from various species of mammoths, which are
related to mastodons, but in a separate genus anyway. Traders
and land surveyors collected additional fossils at Big Bone Lick
in these seventeen fifties and sixties. Scholars were especially intrigued
by the huge molars coming out of the site. The
(04:08):
biggest weighed more than six pounds or around three kilows,
and all of them had knobby cone shaped cups. The
modern consensus is that mastadons used these two too tough vegetation,
but in the eighteenth century many envisioned a different diet,
and it wasn't just the molars. Some naturalists thought that
(04:29):
the animal's tusks would have curved downward like saber teeth,
and some mistook the claws of ground slots as belonging
to mastodons. When Benjamin Franklin received a box of mastodon fossils,
he wrote a quote, The tusks agree with those of
the African and Asiatic elephant, but the grinders differ, being
full knobs like the grinders of a carnivorous animal. They
(04:54):
thought the mastodon was a colossal flesh eating monster. A
mast wound up getting their name because of these molars,
which it turned out, differed from the flatter teeth of mammoths.
But at the time this mysterious monster was called incognitum,
which is basically Latin for we don't know what it is.
(05:16):
Thomas Jefferson became obsessed with the fossils of the Ohio River,
partially because he was really into the study of nature,
but partially because he could use the incognitium to refute
a widely circulated argument about the inherent inferiority of the
so called New World. Okay, In seventeen sixty six, the
(05:38):
French naturalist Georges Louis the Clerk de Befolme published his
theory of American Degeneracy. Buffoon wondered why creatures of the
Americas tended to look puny next to their counterparts in Europe, Africa,
and Asia. For example, a next to one Indian tiger
the Mexican jaguar is a tabby for the article This
(06:00):
episode is based on How Stuffworks. Spoke via email with
environmental historian Mark Barrow Junior. He said Buffon was a
materialist who believed that a limited number of life forms
originally appeared on the Earth through spontaneous generation, and that
as they migrated to different environments, they responded to the
conditions they encountered there by changing form. So Buffon's theory
(06:26):
blamed the climate. Though he had never set foot in
the America's he assumed that it was a swampy place
that had only recently come up out of the sea,
and that this caused the animals that had come here
to degenerate, becoming quote weaker, smaller, and less able to reproduce.
And Buffoon didn't stop there. He claimed the same thing
(06:49):
had happened to human beings who had come to the Americas,
and that it would continue to happen to European immigrants offspring,
and that the Americas would there four never be home
to a great civilization. Barro said Americans found this theory
quite threatening, and Jefferson set out to disprove it. We're
(07:13):
going to get into how and why he sought out
living mastodons, but first we're going to get into a
quick break forward from our sponsors, and we're back. Thank
you sponsors, Okay. Thomas Jefferson, who was born in Virginia
and served as its second governor. Spent a lot of
(07:35):
time and energy on disproving the theory of American degeneracy in
the seventeen seventies and eighties, which we should note was
a busy time for the United States. In other ways,
in the midst and immediate aftermath of the Revolution, Jefferson
collected and published precise measurements of various American animals in
(07:56):
comparison with their European counterparts. He dragged friends and compatriots
into this with the help of the governor of New Hampshire.
He once sent the French naturalist Buffon a massive dead moose,
which was much worse for the travel and wearing a
set of antlers from some other animal because the original
set got lost along the way. But it was proof
(08:19):
that big animals do grow in the Americas, and in
his seventeen eighty five book Notes on the State of Virginia,
Jefferson bolstered his case by writing about the giant incognitum.
He called it a mammoth, then of big bone lick.
With the evidence mounting against Buffon's theory, it fell apart
(08:41):
much like the corpse of a moose arriving in Paris
a year after its untimely end a continent away. American
mammoths became a sensation and source of national pride, especially
after a nearly complete fossil model was compiled and displayed
in Charles Wilson Peel's Philadelphia Museum in eighteen oh one
with the help of enslaved labor. It was the second
(09:04):
ever fossil skeleton to be assembled in the world, and
the excavation of its components from the Hudson River Valley
was probably the first official paleontology expedition in the United States. Still,
Jefferson's love of fossils was ridiculed by his opponents in
the cutthroat presidential race of eighteen hundred. It was forty
(09:25):
years before dinosaurs would be recognized and catch the world's imagination,
but Jefferson carried the day and won the newly completed
White House. While in office, his biggest achievement was arguably
the Louisiana purchase of eighteen oh three. Before Meriwether Lewis
and William Clark set out to survey the newly bought land,
(09:47):
Jefferson told them to keep an eye out for living mammots.
Back then, extinction seemed impossible to many naturalists, including the President.
The basic idea it was that if the Earth is
a divine and perfect creation, then no part of it
could ever truly perish. There was a belief in a
(10:09):
great chain of being too great to be broken, Barrow said.
Since mastodons and mammoths could not possibly be extinct, Jefferson
and others thought they must still be roaming around in
the unexplored parts of the world, unexplored like to European
colonists the North American West. Though Lewis and Clark found
(10:32):
no live specimens, Lewis sent the President a couple of
new Incognium fossils from Big Bone Lick, at Jefferson's behest.
Clark returned to the Ohio River fossil bed with a
ten man team in eighteen oh seven. The fossils that
Clark's party dug up were proudly displayed at the Jefferson
White House. Meanwhile, back in Paris, a French anatomist known
(10:55):
as George Cuvier had been pouring over the different samples
of elephants and elephant like fossils that had been collected there.
In eighteen oh six, he published a study that determined
the Incognitium was a separate species from the mammoths and
named it mastadante. I always assumed that this was a
mast as an masticate and dante as in tooth, but
(11:18):
it turns out it was masked as in breast because
the guy found that the aforementioned knobs on the molars
reminded him of boobs. Anyway, Cuvier also included the truly
shocking hypothesis that both of these creatures were extinct, that
they were too different from living elephants to be the
same creatures, and that there was no evidence that they
(11:41):
were still roaming the earth. He laid out a concept
that throughout history there had been periodic catastrophic die offs
after which new species had supernaturally arisen, and that this
cycle continues. He didn't believe in evolution, to be clear,
he did believe in scientific racism, so he was not
(12:04):
always right. We wouldn't get in on evolution until a
half century later with Charles Darwin's work, but this study
of elephants and mammoths and mastodons marked the first time
that the wide European scientific community took the idea of extinction. Seriously,
not bad work for a bunch of old bones. Today,
(12:28):
some of those bones are on view in museums all
over the United States and Europe, then beyond, others returned
to Kentucky. In nineteen sixty, the Big Bone Lick Fossil
Site was incorporated into a new state park. A museum
is now on the premises, along with life sized statues
of the prehistoric critters. At the entrance, visitors are greeted
(12:51):
by a sign that reads Big Bone Lick Historic Site,
Birthplace of American Vertebrate Paleontology. Today's episode is based on
the article The mask Don Boneyard that Stole Thomas Jefferson's
Heart on HowStuffWorks dot com, written by Mark Mancini. Brain
Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with HowStuffWorks dot
(13:13):
Com and is produced by Tyler Quain. Four more podcasts
from my Heart Radio visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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