12/27/2022 0 Comments Mastodonte en anglais![]() How the American mastodon got its scientific name is a little more complicated. Since teeth were mainly what he and other naturalists were comparing, Cuvier took the Greek words for breast and tooth to coin mastodon – the “bubby-toothed elephant, as naturalist Thomas Jefferson would later put it. Drawing from illustrations created by American artist and museum pioneer Rembrandt Peale, Cuvier noted that the bumps on the mammal’s molars looked like breasts. The name came from looking the animal in the mouth. ![]() Mammoth was still a fitting term for the Siberian animal, but, Cuvier decided, the North American animal should be called the mastodon. Cuvier got fed-up enough with the confusion that in 1806 he wrote a paper that tried to sort out the mess. Naturalists were not always careful to distinguish the two massive, extinct elephants from each other. This oversight came back to bite him.ĭespite their disparate teeth, the mammoth and Incognitum were often misconstrued as the same animal. The bumpy-toothed American form was still commonly called the Incognitum, and Cuvier did not offer a replacement in his initial paper on the subject. The conditions that had sustained them had been wiped away, perhaps in a terrible environmental catastrophe of the sort Cuvier was just beginning to entertain as he pondered the depths of the fossil record.īut what to call such beasts? The Siberian form – with the ribbon-like pattern on its teeth – was already known as the mammoth. More than that, Cuvier proposed that the fossil elephants preferred different habitats than their modern relatives. Cuvier had offered fossil proof that extinction is a reality – a fact some naturalists still questioned despite the fact that humanity had already wiped out the dodo and other species. This wasn’t just anatomical hair-splitting. “The first suspicions that there are more than one species came from a comparison of several molar teeth that were known to belong to elephants, and which showed considerable differences,” Cuvier explained to his audience, “some having their crown sculpted in a lozenge form, the others in the form of festooned ribbons.” And from the fossil teeth, Cuvier concluded, “These animals thus differ from elephants as much as, or more than, a dog differs from the jackal and the hyena.” Remembered as one of the founders of paleontology, Cuvier was just 27 when he stood before France’s National Institute in 1796 and explained that the elephant bones from Eurasia and those from North America – then referred to the “American Incognitum” – actually belonged to extinct species unlike those alive today. ![]() Elephantine bones found in England, for example, were attributed to behemoths the Romans must have used as pack animals during their occupation, and French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon suggested that huge bones found in Siberia showed that the world was once much warmer and allowed modern elephants to range further afield. This is not a new problem.īack in the late 18th century, when paleontology was a nascent science, many naturalists thought that giant elephant bones found in Europe, northern Eurasia, and America were from modern species that used to live there. ![]() But even worse, the shadow of the woolly mammoth stretches so far that the mastodon is often confused for its shaggy relative. The beast lived at the same time as the famous woolly mammoth, yet the mastodon is not nearly as popular as its tundra-living cousin. I have a soft spot for the American mastodon. ![]()
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