In this article, he stated that Asian and African elephants belonged to different species, and that mammoth fossils belonged to another missing species and those that appeared in Italy, which were considered bones of Hanibal elephants. Prior to the Paraguay fossil article, he wrote another of great prestige, about living elephant species and fossils. It was said with Cuvier that a tooth or a small piece of jaw had enough to meet an animal, and often also to give gender and species. The illustration was based on a 1796 article by the new paleontology star Georges Cuvier. It was discovered in Paraguay and assembled in the Royal Cabinet of Natural History of Madrid. The ignorance we have of the west and northwest of our country makes it impossible to say what is not there."īut before giving that lecture, in a number of the English magazine Monthly Magazine, he saw an illustration of the fossil of a giant finger animal. And, like the ghost, he said he could still be alive: "Inside our continent there are plenty of places for elephants and lions that can live in this climate, and also for mammoth and Megalonyx. In March 1797 he presented the beast Megalonyx at a conference in Philadelphia. By the size of the claws he calculated that it would be three times greater than African lions. They looked like an animal from the family of lions, tigers and panthers, but that beast had to be much bigger. When Jefferson saw them, he was fascinated. Mine workers discovered the bones of one leg and huge claws. In the spring of 1796, Jefferson was fascinated by the bones of another animal. And I say: Why leave it out as if it did not exist?" When included in the Notes on the State of Virginia animal list, write: "You can ask me why I put the ghost in as if it still existed. The appearance of these monsters in indigenous legends reinforces Jefferson's hope. And I wasn't so sure it had disappeared, maybe those animals could be alive in some unexplored area of America. On the contrary, I thought it was like the Siberian mammoths, perhaps the same species. Jefferson was clear that he was not a normal elephant or a hippo. On the contrary, it reduced the American mammoth to the level of normal elephants or hippos, and even looked like a missing animal, which the Frenchman used in favor of his theory. And it was also the "greatest being on earth." Buffon's ideas were powerless before a giant carnivorous elephant. Jefferson, like many other contemporaries, was convinced that he was a carnivorous mammoth. This giant elephant was credited with the vitality and brutality of a tiger. There were fangs that looked down like a saber-toothed tiger. Grieved by the idea of degeneration, American naturalists were so excited to claim the greatness and brutality of that creature that they made six times bigger and put some terrible claws on it. At first it became known as American incognitum and was then identified as mammoth. In recent years the bones of that giant animal were being discovered. And if buffalo and bears were not enough, those huge mammoths would have silenced anything. Jefferson compared the weights of several European and American animals to show that those in America were no poorer. And he wanted to face these arguments in his book Notes on the State of Virginia, published in 1781. Jefferson admired the work of the French naturalist, but considered his continent degenerate. Their sexual organs are also small and weak."įor Buffon, the American fauna was degenerate. Nor did the natives have virility: "They have no burrs, hair on the body, or passion for the female. According to him, the lands of that continent were almost sterile and the animals were smaller and weaker than those of the Old World, since the harmful vapors of the corrupt swamps and the sunless forests weakened them. In 1761 Buffon wrote that the creatures of the New World were less numerous than those of the Old World. The culprit was a great French naturalist: Georges Louis Leclerc, Count of Buffon. Twenty years earlier came an unfounded myth.
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