Page 19 - The Restless Earth Fossils

1 Fossils

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826):
American President and

Paleontologist

In November 1796, Colonel John Stewart sent Thomas Jefferson
three enormous claws that were discovered in a cave in western
Virginia. Early the next year, in a letter to Benjamin Rush of the
Philosophical Society, Jefferson wrote, “What are we to think of a
creature whose claws were 8 inches long, when those of a lion are not
1 ½ inches . . .?” If perfectly created species were truly eternal, where
were the living examples of these bizarre and monstrous beasts?
Jefferson thought he knew the answer: “In the present interior
of our continent,” he said, “there is surely space and range enough
for elephants and lions.”
In 1803, when he had been president of the United States for
two years, Jefferson saw an opportunity to fund the exploration
of western North America. Using $2,500 from Congress and some
of his own money, he directed Captain Meriwether Lewis to find a
trade route from the Missouri River to the mouth of the Columbia.
Lewis enlisted his friend William Clark to share the command. While
they prepared to get underway, Jefferson negotiated the Louisiana
Purchase, giving the United States title to all the land between the
Mississippi and the “Stony Mountains.” The expedition produced an
amazing record of the natural history and Native American cultures
en route and laid the foundations of the united states geological
survey.
Of those fossil specimens sent to him by Stewart in 1796, one
species bears Jefferson’s name: Megalonyx Jeffersoni, or “great claw.”
It was not a huge lion as he had first thought, but a ground sloth the
size of an elephant. Sadly, it was no longer living in the unexplored
western wilderness of America at the time of the Lewis and Clark
expedition, but had vanished with the continental glaciers 10,000
years before.

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